


to melt the gilded seams

by witchfall



Series: a garden in detroit [2]
Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Body Dysphoria, Cyberlife intrigue, Cybernetics, Disabled Character, Established Relationship, F/M, Nonbinary Character, Queerplatonic Relationships
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-03
Updated: 2019-05-10
Packaged: 2019-10-21 08:36:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 25,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17639423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/witchfall/pseuds/witchfall
Summary: [Direct sequel to 'the silver lining still remains']In the aftermath of the Abel disaster and the revelations about her childhood, Emma Ibori has kept busy preparing to end the secrecy surrounding her life and the true origin of androids. Connor, meanwhile, continues to pester Markus about the feasibility of human-android marriage laws.But Emma’s life no longer feels like her own...a vagary made from Connor's increasingly busy schedule, the strange looks her best friend Ryker gives her when they think she isn't looking, and an exhaustion born of a dread that sinks into her bones from simply leaving the house.When she finally acts, the axis tilts -- but not as she expects. To keep Emma and Connor safe from a growing terrorist threat (and a Cyberlife executive sniffing where he shouldn’t be), Jericho is going to make a spectacle of the one thing she wants to keep to herself: her singular relationships with the RK800 and WR600.But as the world turns its glaring eyes their way, how long can their silent fault lines hold?





	1. the mountains we've made

**Author's Note:**

> I HIGHLY recommend reading 'the silver lining still remains' before reading this story, as this one will spoil everything for you! But I am not a sign, I can't tell you what to do. :)  
> Lovingly beta'd by @popsicletheduck and @masqvia

_April 2040_

_Even with Connor in D.C., it takes Emma, Chase, Messi and Ryker little more than an afternoon to pack up the entirety of Emma’s physical life into boxes. That’s how she finds herself alone in an empty bedroom -- once hers, but barely ever that -- riding the sharp waves of a sudden whim._

_She pulls the memory box out of the dusty top shelf of her closet and settles it on the carpet with a thick clank. She feels a little high from the remnant dust as she digs into the sea of school photos, report cards, flimsy movie tickets and plastic vacation baubles for the sake of...what?_

_She searches until she finds the photo some part of her remembered. Her father and mother -- Ji-hun and Shara -- smiling together at the head of a long table. The lighting is poor; someone was taking photos with the flash on. But Mom has flowers woven into her curls. Her dress is a simple cream color with a boatline neck and her laughing grin is radiant. Dad is laughing, too, teeth perfect white, navy suit wrinkled but fitted, purple bowtie slightly askew. His arm is around her mother’s shoulders. Their cheeks nearly touch._

_She can almost hear her mother’s voice, honeyed and happy for once. “Oh, we had no money. Both of us in post-grad. We just hurried and married. That’s what we wanted to do.”_

_She turns the photo around to read the writing on the back. “Shara and Ji-hun wedding, June 1, 2013.” She does the math in her head and realizes: she is older than they are in this photo. The dissonance makes her chest feel numb._

_But their love could reignite the sun._

_She covets a memory like this for herself so viciously that she has to close her eyes and go somewhere else in her head. Because that’s what she’s looking for, for reasons hard to fathom -- proof that even lives that end in tragedy could still see bright spots of joy._

* * *

 

_June 2040_

[REPLAY MEMORY?]

[ACCEPT]

“Hey darlin’.”

Emma sighs heavily, pulling her fingers through her thick auburn curls to throw them over her head. She looks down into the phone camera from an angle that suggests she is leaning up against her new headboard, pillows tucked in against her back.

“I’m glad I caught you before you fell asleep,” Connor hears himself say, and the relief settles like warm gauze both within the memory and without. He studies the video call closely. Her olive skin is pale. Her freckles stand out like dirt against glass and heavy, dark circles weigh down her cognac brown eyes. He watches her until he catches the orange flash of light behind her pupils.

A pulse of life. A flash of difference.

“You almost didn’t,” she says. “Feel like I’ve been fighting off a nap all day.”

“Your new medicine?”

“Maybe.” She closes her eyes.

“Have you been experiencing any strange side effects?”

“It’s hard to tell anymore.”

“I remember the doctor saying something about experiencing a strange electric feeling--”

She rolls her head back.

“Can we not? Can we talk about something else? Please?”

It normally goes like this. Her patience for talking about her health has only declined as his worry has skyrocketed. Anxiety is such a worthless emotion; it perpetuates itself in a cascade pattern and lingers in his biocomponents. But he has not been with her for the past three weeks, and that fact rankles him so much that he has to rejigger his breathing protocol to fire correctly, just as he did in the memory.

[END MEMORY PLAYBACK]

His programming demands action regarding the most important of his mission parameters (the constant [PROTECT EMMA] that buzzes in the corner of his eye), and yet to do that, he has to be away in Washington, D.C., doing his job. Talking to politicians and lobbyists in gold dining rooms with dark wood lining and crystal chandeliers to convince what feels like the entire world to sign Markus’ comprehensive Android Rights legislation into law.

To convince them that they really are people, willing to assimilate.

Connor glances down at his work phone -- something he obtained out of preference by his largely human team for “security reasons” -- and scrolls to his photo gallery with practiced precision. He lands on a photo of Emma leaning over his shoulder in a Detroit park, grinning down at the camera. The sky shines cobalt blue behind her wild hair, and her laughing smile reveals her bright white teeth.

He misses her so fiercely he routinely runs diagnostics to ensure a part of him isn’t actually, literally missing -- but then, a part of him is, in a way. He can hear Hank scoffing from here. But Hank, Connor thinks, would agree.

Only a two-hour flight remained of the fog of this three-week work trip. The constant typing in front of bright screens. The painful mediation of hope.

“Grip it any tighter and it might shatter.”

He flicks his gaze up toward his aide, in the seat across from him.

[NAME: HALE, SAMANTHA // LEGISLATIVE AIDE  
BORN: 10/13/2013  
CRIMINAL RECORD: NONE]

“I thought you might actually relax for once.” Her words are clipped and efficient and teasing. She watches him over a thin, swiftly scrolling tablet, unreadable as amber.

He smiles slightly. “There is a saying about what happens when you assume.”

She smiles back. Like a mirror. “You’ve been looking at that picture for a while.”

Some switch jolts inside of him and he opts for silence.

Her smile inches closer to genuine. She glances down at his phone. “Sorry. You still hold it like a toddler learning how to play cards.”

He looks out the airplane window, over clouds and distant flatlands, where the people are small as mites. “I’m...glad to be going home.”

“She’s cute.”

Connor turns back immediately. Sam’s dark gaze pierces him through.

“An android?” she asks.

He stares at her until he realizes she is genuinely asking.

“No,” he says quietly.

Sam's eyebrows shoot up a single centimeter. She places the tablet on the thin table between them and leans back in her leather chair, watching him. He’s seen this look before. Part of him steels in preparation.

“This explains a lot,” she says.

“Not for most people.”

“You’ve been in a terrible mood for the past week.”

“Have I?”

She smirks, but it fades immediately. “You don't talk about her much.”

“I don't want--”

The words die in his vocoder.   _I don't want her to get hurt. From attention. From my enemies._

Even thinking the words feels like setting the last slab of stone on an already creaking cart. Emma has considerable mechanical alteration (“a cyborg,” she explains plainly), but she's also a bright, mouthy, endlessly kind human being, and he wishes there was a way for everyone to see her as he saw her. She is determined to press on for the sake of truth -- tell the whole world how she became what she is so that no one suffers from the secrets anymore. So that humans have a new understanding of their connection to androids.

He had recently begun to understand the intoxicating calm of lies.

“You're worried about her,” Sam notes quietly.

“Always.”

Sam purses her lips against a number of unspoken things. “What does she do?”

“Carpentry,” he says.

She’s good at deduction and that’s why she is on this plane and not back in D.C. with the rest of his team. He knows what she is really asking, but he's not willing to give her this yet. She reaches for her cup of ginger ale, long drained, and taps her fingernails against the glass. “Are you worried it will become an issue?”

“In what way?” he asks.

“You tell me.”

“It’s been fine so far,” Markus says from across the cabin. Connor slides his gaze toward Markus, who watches them both with the reserved warmth of a curious patron. Simon, sitting across from him, pointedly keeps his eyes on his tablet -- but the PL600 is always listening.

Sam finally turns away, toward the airplane window, brows furrowed in thought. She slides a blonde hair back behind her ear and breathes out through her nose for five seconds straight.

“You can ask, Ms. Hale,” Connor says softly. “I don’t mind.”

He really doesn’t. It feels like a pressure release, speaking of Emma openly like this.

She doesn’t look at him, but her mouth relaxes slightly. “How long have you…?”

“Since November 2039.”

She sits up immediately. “Since--”

Her mouth snaps shut again. Her eyes search his face. How had he kept this hidden from her, his blood hound? What else could he hide from her?

What did he  _intend?_

He leans back in his chair. Tension releases in a soft tick from his back that he catalogues away for future upkeep. “And hopefully for as long as we both are alive.”

Her mouth turns downwards. He thinks for a moment that she is going to say something angry. Accuse him of hiding key intel that prevents her from doing her job — she can’t protect his image if she doesn’t know everything. She can’t handle his affairs if he keeps half the workload to himself. But the tightness around her eyes loosens and he realizes she isn’t angry.

She’s thinking of the other side of the coin of “how long.” The collision of immovable object and unstoppable force; “how long” for an android has a different definition. He knows this because he is thinking of it, too, like he has been since he first saw Emma bleed. He knows because he can smell sadness and pity from a mile away after living in its stink in D.C. for so long.

But as soon as he notices this, she raises her hands as if giving up. A smirk erases all hint of emotionality.

“Well, now I’m definitely glad I am coming along,” she says.

He squints at her. He can feel Markus watching them.

“I’m really curious to meet the type of woman that puts up with you and isn’t even paid for it.”

* * *

 

It’s happening again.

Emma counts the flowers. Tastes their colors, pink like fizz and yellow like lemons and -- no. Not right. Start over.

Cement yourself to this moment, here in Ryker’s garden. Feel the too-hot summer sun on skin and the licking breeze out of the northwest, bringing a promise of cooler air from Canada. Settle your knees deep into the grass. Do not think of the snapdragons and how they smell like citrus.

One of the handlers in that hellhole house of her youth always smelled like tangy flowers and bleach.

Do not think of listening to that handler’s Monday afternoon soaps. Of the cold hallway floors sticking to the back of a smaller Emma’s legs. Of Noah leaning his head into her shoulder “to listen better” but really because being apart felt like staring down a big hole into nothing and--

Suddenly she’s a little girl again. She feels the world slip between her fingers, replaced by a sizzling anger that cleanses every thought. Something beeps in her head. Noah’s small face, innocent and pale, hovers superimposed on the face of Abel, the man who tried to kill her and Connor. The two repel like the same side of a magnet.

Her ears ring, high-pitched and trilling like mad bells. Her vision fuzzes out like an old TV. Her lungs seize. {PROCESSING --MEMORY!!ERROR. VARIABLES76857. ERROR UNKNOWN.}

“Ryker! She’s doing it again!”

Emma blinks a few times. Chase’s voice. Grass. Garden. Sun. Wind. Come out of it. Breathe.

For _fuck’s_ sake! Breathe!

{ERROR. ERROR. ERROR------8978792*&^*^&^----ONLINE}

“I can’t look away for five minutes to get tools anymore,” she hears Ryker grumble, but in the way they do when things are truly going to shit. She hears the telltale pitter-stomp through the grass of Messi following not far behind. Emma rises to her feet, as if to make a point, and the world spins. She can’t catch her breath.

“Ibori. What happened?” Chase instantly reaches his arms out to stabilize her. “Look at my face.”

“Nothing,” she lies through her teeth. Chase merely stares at her as if she just announced that the sky is green. “Another _fucking_ memory resurfaced.”

“Everything is alright, remember?” Ryker reminds her, though they grasp tightly to her wrist, turning it over to check her pulse. A gardener should not be so good at doing that, some distant part of her thinks. “The rate’s been slowing.”

She resists the primal urge to pull her wrist back, but not before Ryker notices her hand flex into a fist. They release her immediately.

“I’m going to call the editors,” Ryker says. “You can’t do this yet.”

She covers her guilt by smashing her palms into her eyes and dragging her hands down her face. “If we put it off, the journalists start doubting,” Emma says, as she has explained for what feels like the 500th time this week.

Ryker looms over her, standing with their crutches. For once, the full impact of their height difference -- their 6’2” to her 5’5” -- makes itself apparent. “You don’t think they’d believe you after sitting with you for interviews for hours at a time? That maybe you’re a little mentally unready for this?”  
  
“I’m not having this argument with you again.”  
  
She digs a toothpick out of her pocket, unable to look them in the eye. Normally, this is the point of the conversation where Ryker freezes as if to recollect themselves and Emma sorts through the weird signals coming from her cyborg brain, and then they both apologize and completely skip over whatever it is they were talking about. Peace is a balm best applied thickly. This time, Ryker fishes a set of familiar flash cards out of their shirt pocket and shoves them at Chase, who watches the exchange with a brittle expression.  
  
"Then I'm not having any part of this. I'm going inside."  
  
Her heart gives a lurch. "Come on."  
  
"No. I'm not talking about this anymore," they snap. "Don't stay out too long or you'll sunburn."  
  
The creaking of Ryker's crutches fades until she hears the backdoor to their house slam behind them. She jams the toothpick between her teeth and bites down until she is certain she can look at Chase or Messi and not burst into tears.  
  
"It okay, Miss Emma," Messi says softly, pulling on Emma's wrist. "Ryker just tired."  
  
"I know," she says, and she knows because it’s her fault.  
  
Emma sits down back in the grass. Messi presses her hands deeply into Emma’s thigh as a form of pressure therapy and hums a little child’s song, from somewhere deep in her calming medical programming. Emma absently untangles strands of Messi’s thick, long hair.  
  
Chase settles into a wicker chair set up close to Ryker's latest flower beds. He closely examines the flash cards. "Where were you born?" he reads off one.  
  
God.  
  
Maybe she isn't ready for this.  
  
“I’m tired of pop quizzes about myself," she says. "Can’t we just have some nice garden time? In quiet?”  
  
Chase holds the card primly in both hands, eyeing her suspiciously over its edge. She closes her eyes against another wave of vertigo. She can nearly hear Natalie, her therapist, speaking in her head. _Think of things to be thankful for._  
  
Connor is finally coming home. She won’t have to pretend that she can get through the night by herself while curled up in painful knots on Ryker’s couch. She won’t lie awake, afraid of the dark and what she might remember of it. She won’t feel like a pathetic loser pining after someone who has only been gone three weeks.  
  
Three long-ass, terrible weeks.  
  
“It’s publishing tomorrow morning, Ibori," Chase says, as if explaining this to a child. "People are going to ask. They are going to try and find holes."  
  
"I'm gonna remember. My body won't let me do anything damn else."  
  
Both of them fall silent at that. For a moment, the only sound between them is Messi's soft humming.  
  
"Hmm," Chase says after a long moment, which is Chase for _Yeah, I don't believe you._

* * *

 

Emma used to make a sport out of fading into crowds. _I am among you, but not a part of you_ , she'd think, and she would disappear before anyone could ask her why she was drinking alone.

Hank pushes a black coffee across the small table. {IDENTIFIED: COFFEA ARABICA, 172 DEGREES F. } “Sorry. Decaf only for you.”

{ACCESSING LOGS…} “Goddamn meds,” she manages. She wraps both of her hands around the cup, like Connor would do if he was here. He could never drink it.

{STARBUCKS COPYRIGHTED BLEND. DO YOU LIKE COFFEE….*&*^*&????}

“Em?”

Her muscles twitch and lock up in strange places. She takes deep breaths. Cut it off at the stem. It doesn’t have to be like this.

{EMMIE I DON’T KNOW ABOUT THIS…}

_Quit it._

“Emma!”

She blinks hard and watches as Hank yanks the coffee cup out of her tight grasp. Only now does she realize she has squeezed the cup until its boiling hot contents spilled over onto her skin.

“Burning yourself won’t do the trick,” Hank gruffs. He tugs at the napkin dispenser and dabs at her knuckles lightly.

“Sorry,” she says automatically. She grounds her feet to the floor. The hand still tingles. She gets the feeling it should hurt more than it does, but the busy airport atrium has flooded her with so much stimuli that she is shocked when she sees that the spill has left a red welt on her skin.

(Noah -- Abel -- he said he didn’t feel pain anymore, didn’t feel anything--)

“Connor won’t like that,” she mutters.

Hank scoffs. He finishes cleaning the table and tosses the napkins into the nearby trash-can. “Yeah, he’s gonna be out of his mind now, thanks for that. Lucky I’ve dealt with worse attitude problems than you...”

Hank refers to it as an attitude problem because he knows she laughs when he does. An attitude problem would be laughably, wonderfully normal. “Great,” she mutters.

His eyes soften. “North'll be back with our clearance soon.”

She huffs and lays her forehead (and burned hand) on the cool metal table.

Current security policy is that no one may be in the private plane receiving area who is not a passenger until within 20 minutes of the landing time. In a fit of anxious energy, Hank and Emma arrived at least an hour early, but they’d been waiting for close to 40 minutes already.

Meaning…

“There she is.” Hank sips his coffee. “Just like I promised. Our boys almost here?” he says to North.

“We’re in luck. They’re ahead of schedule. They’re already taxi-ing in.”

Emma looks up to see North with a rare, true smile on her beautifully carved face. Her hair is in its usual side plait, though she is experimenting with blonder highlights that stand out like ice against her dark clothes. She brandishes the thin pass tablets like three playing cards.

Emma is up and moving out of the chair before North can say another word.

She raps her knuckles against her thigh as she speed walks to the private jet gates, past a dancing water fountain and quiet museum displays of old world cars that feel like pockets of a different time and place. She half-runs down a windowless, wide hallway lit with shades of purple and green like some petrified nightmare vision of the future, all cornerless architecture and the constant feeling that you have to be _going_ somewhere.

Her phone is vibrating, but her hands are shaking too much to pull it out of her pocket. She shoves her credentials at the TSA agents who give her strange looks, but they let her pass once North catches up to wave them off.

“I swear it was decaf,” she hears Hank mutter to North.

Emma reaches the gate, eyes fixated on the gleaming jet rolling down the tarmac. The creamy, nondescript white of an undecorated fuselage, dark windows and an extended walkway remain her only obstacles. All that is left is waiting, which is nearly impossible for her to do. She turns around to speak to Hank and North only to find they are still somewhat far behind.

She runs through a mental checklist. Connor is on that airplane. Ryker is at home watching one of their favorite late afternoon nature programs and keeping an eye on Messi, who is likely experimenting on the dirt in their garden. Chase is on the late shift at the department store. Hank is coming up behind her. Her aunt and uncle are...doing whatever it is they do.

{eeeEEEmmmmiEEEEEE}

_You do not own me, you are not real. You are just one aspect of my thoughts._

But then, Natalie was not programmed to deal with the fussy, indeterminable nature of a wetware-enhanced human brain. So. There’s that. Emma falls into one of those black beam seats one always finds in airports and bounces her knee until the pressure against her heel thrums through her whole body.

“ _Emma._ ”

For a moment, she is so absorbed in sorting out her thoughts that she looks up and expects Hank.

But she knows that voice.

She rises to her feet at once. “Hey,” she says. It comes out a breathless whisper, weighed down by everything beneath it. Connor strides down the walkway at unnatural android speed. His polished dress shoes click against the hard floor.

His face is stolen from an angel in Venice. Dark eyes, warm as homemade cake, a smile, a--

She hears the luggage -- his little chrome luggage, the pieces she helped him pick out at the mall -- click to a stop just as an arm crushes around her middle. A hand snakes behind her neck. She’s pulled into an embrace so tight that _feeling_ finally fully returns to her senses, rushing in like water through a cavern. Her eyes burn.

“I missed you so much,” he says, straightforward and breaking and quiet. “I was certain something was wrong with me.”

He pulls back to look at her, and his smile flickers. His hand around her neck moves to touch just beneath her eyes.

“Sorry.” She sniffles and apologizes, like she does too often anymore. “I know it was only three weeks.”

“It was terrible. I was very bored,” Connor says, in that deadpan way of his, and it makes her laugh. She throws her arms around his neck and plants the kiss she’d been dreaming of for three weeks right on his mouth, all stupid bravery. He takes a deep, sudden breath through his nose and pulls her tighter against him, sighing softly, like he finally could accept that she was really here, really wanted him back, more than anything. He only breaks away to speak so quietly against her mouth that she wonders if she imagined it. “...my love...”

“God, you’d think you hadn't seen each other in 5 years.”

Emma doesn’t even turn around to flip Hank off. He laughs. She laughs. She looks back, carefully ensconced in Connor’s arms, and puts her hands up as if to say, ‘Guilty.’

Hank walks toward them. “What am I, chopped liver?”

A cool hand touches her burned one almost in an instant.

“...Emma.” Connor’s voice tightens. “What happened?”

“Oh, here we go,” she mutters. And Hank, that asshole, laughs more.

* * *

 

As soon as Connor settles into the back seat of Hank's old Ford, a strange weight lifts from his thirium pump. He takes a long, unnecessary drag of the scent of old leather, dusty blankets and the sickly sweet tinge of alcohol from a bottle that once broke open on the carpets years ago. A human wouldn't notice it, he thinks, or they would comment. But then, he doesn’t want to think about the differences between himself and humanity.  

He wants to watch Emma curl herself into the backseat -- all human sighing and complaint, beautiful and alive.

Emma clicks her seat belt and contours herself to his shoulder, leaning so that her forehead lays against his neck. He wraps an arm around her, pulling her against him so tightly that he has to triple-check to ensure he isn’t crushing her. She doesn't complain.

"Comfy," she mutters, as if angry about it. He presses his nose into her wild red hair.

Lavender. Chipped plywood. The summer wind. Coming home.

(How long would this go? How long could he do the stretches without her? He's adaptable. He is built to be the perfect teammate. Adapting to human ingenuity, fine, he is quite capable. They did not prepare him for human desires. Of any kind. The very notion of wanting something is supposed to be foreign to him and he has never wanted anything more in his life than this feeling, like he’s finally climbed through the earth to see the sun.)

He’s startled out of his reverie because she starts snoring softly. Hank's eyes flick to the rearview, as if finally granted permission to speak.

"You really doin' alright out there?" Hank asks. His voice is quieter than usual. He clears his throat and looks pointedly to Emma for a moment. "Pretty long work trip for you."

Connor casts his gaze out the car window to the rolling cityscape of Detroit. He catalogs the  strange pinging in his heart as another type of homecoming -- a realization of what was missed. "It's what it is," he says flatly, because he is not sure what else to say. "People act like they want to hear what we have to say. But...I see the way they look at us."

"Oh?"

He meets Hank's eyes in the mirror. "Sometimes it's fear. Sometimes it's pity. Sometimes it's...an anger I don't understand."

Hank makes a sound of disgust. "Fuckin' politicians..."

"They don't know how to talk to us, I think."

"But you're okay?" Hank asks, more intently than before. "You feel safe?"

"We're safe, Hank," Connor says softly. He holds Hank's watery gaze until Hank is the first to turn away, eyes back on the road. "It would take a very determined terrorist to strike the Congressional halls in D.C."

"Who's the blonde? The aide you were tellin' me about? She looks very...serious."

"Sam. Yes. She's helping me gather intel before our next big excursion. She is...as you say."

"Heh. Coming from you..."

"I know," Connor says. “She has her work cut out for her.”

Hank finally smiles into the mirror.

"Man, lemme tell you, when I last visited D.C...."

Connor lets Hank tell some anecdote about a previous trip, in which people "weren't even allowed on the damn sidewalk on Pennsylvania Ave. to take pictures of the damn White House," because it seems to help Hank steady his vitals. But once Hank runs out of asides, Connor decides to finally address the flashing warning in his vision. [PROTECT EMMA.]

“Was she okay?”

Hank sighs. Connor squints, considering all the reasons why Hank may lie to him about this.

“She'll give you some bullshit," Hank says after a long moment. "It's a mixed fucking bag. But she's...holding on better than I would. I'd say.”

The turn signal blinks. Connor syncs his breathing with it as he re-orders his sudden splatter of thoughts.  
  
"She's...the article..."  
  
"Tomorrow morning."  
  
He freezes. He hadn't forgotten -- he rarely forgets anything -- but this particular insight had been shoved far back enough in his processes that he hadn't realized the date of publication on the story about her horrific youth was so soon. He's nearly seized by a protocol that would have prompted him to yank her entirely into his lap.

"I should have been here," he whispers, horrified.  
  
"No," Hank says, firmly. "You know that isn't how this works. Not anymore."

Connor closes his mouth. He knows. How this works is that he lives and works separately from the love of his life even as she’s withering half a country away. He knows that’s how it is supposed to work.

But he’s running out of context. All the pains are new and strong and he is running out of assurance that all of them are survivable.

* * *

 

As soon as they reach Hank's, the trio decides to keep a quiet night in. Hank insists on cooking because Connor just got back from a long trip, which prompts Connor to protest he isn't tired like that, which prompts Hank to tell him to shut up and sit down like the thankful asshole he should be, which makes Connor remind everyone he doesn’t _actually eat_ any food...and so it goes. Emma loves every second of it.

She drinks chamomile tea with honey (Connor's version is a close second only to Ryker's) and sits on the couch between Connor and Hank in a warm haze watching baseball. Eventually, Hank excuses himself to bed. Emma and Connor quickly leave to Connor's room. Everyone's tired of pretending to be anything but exhausted.

That doesn't stop Connor from kissing her as soon as the door is closed. Soft and gentle, he presses in on her jaw, the corner of her lips, her mouth. He holds her tightly against his chest as if he could keep all the world away, and she leans into him, believing it. But it's all a trick, she realizes too late, to pick her up and deposit her in the soft down comforter he bought just for her.

He sits on the mattress and unbuttons his shirt sleeve.“You have a lot of sleep to catch up on, my love.”

“Hrmph,” she says from within a down cocoon. She sits up, blanket still wrapped around her body and head, and leans forward as if to issue a challenge. “Maybe I want to kiss you all night. What about that?”

“Have you taken your medicine?”

“Yes…”

“Then you'll be falling asleep in about an hour.”

“Try me.”

He scans her face for a long moment before he leans over to kiss her on the nose. “Somehow I missed you acting like _this,_ too.”

She smiles. He rises to begin unpacking his luggage, placing perfectly folded clothes into his drawers.

His room is no longer a place of spartan order, at least. She framed a few of his pencil drawings to hang on the wall; at least one of them is of her alone, looking over the Detroit River (he insisted on that one). Some drawings are of Hank and Sumo, of Markus laughing in a garden next to North and Simon, of Josh reading quietly against a window. He also hung a drawing from Messi that is mostly abstract color splotches. She glances to the dresser and the collection of objects there: his DPD badge and official portrait, a snow globe with a beach santa inside it (“I like the dissonance,” he said as explanation once), an old quarter collection, and a rubik’s cube.

But all his work clothes are still the same uniform he prefers, she notes with some humor. It's like out of a TV show where the main character has a closet full of exactly one outfit. He folds pants and hangs shirts and she relishes the quiet domesticity of it all like inoculation against the loneliness of other nights.

“How is Ryker?” Connor asks, breaking the comfortable silence.

She pulls in the comforter tighter around her. “Fine.”

He looks at her back over his shoulder, expectant.

She sighs. “I made them mad.”

“But you're always so agreeable.”

She snorts an involuntary laugh. “Yeah, real picture of function over here.”

He hangs the last shirt and turns back fully to her. She takes in a sudden breath at the weight in his expression -- at the way his frown could break glass.

“They don't think I should publish tomorrow, but it's too late,” she blurts as if being interrogated. Anything to stop his face from looking like that. “It’s gonna happen sooner or later and I’m so damn tired of sitting on it like it’s a bomb ready to go. I’m good, you know? I just want it done.”

He sits on the mattress close enough that her knee slips over his lap and she sinks in toward him. He wraps one of her many loose, coily hairs around his finger quietly. “Something is bothering you, though.”

Her eyes feel misty. “I’m just tired.” And then, against her better judgement, she adds: “I had another memory relapse today.”

He freezes, like he tends to do when she talks about this, and it makes her feel worse but she can’t tell him that.

“It was fine,” she says quickly. “They aren’t happening as often.”

“This isn’t the one that prompted you to burn you hand.”

“No, that wasn’t---that was just me...zoning out…”

She thinks of Noah’s voice, booming in her thoughts, because hiding from it gives him -- it -- power, and thoughts are not reality. She thinks his name so intently she nearly says it. Luckily, she bites her tongue.

Because already she has said too much.

Connor leans in toward her until their foreheads touch. She expects him to kiss her, but he places his hands firmly around the small of her back as he pulls her into his lap, lips not quite touching. Her legs straddle him and her arms circle his neck, prompting the comforter to fall to the floor. She feels a strange heat from the vulnerability. But he holds her tightly against him and she welcomes the pressure.

His mouth is beside her ear. "I can't keep spending time away from you like this.”

“You have to.”

“You're more important.”

She pulls back to look at him. “More important than all of android life?”

His shoulders loosen. He buries his face in her neck and she cradles his head with one hand. He can't keep talking like this because she is tempted to agree. But he has to build a life outside her own. That is what she swore she would never let him give up.

There is so much he hasn't seen…

“It's okay, darling,” she says softly. “I'm not dying yet. I still got shit to do.”

“Like drive me insane,” he mutters.

She laughs. His grip tightens and her stomach flutters. “In a good way?”

He leans back just enough so that their foreheads meet again. She settles her gaze on his cheekbones as his eyes seek hers. “On occasion.”

Finally, finally, he sighs, like giving in to her orbit, and he kisses her until she can’t think about anything but him.

* * *

 

21:37 Lil.lion.lady74: we'll be over by 7

21:37 Lil.lion.lady74: love u

21:38 Lil.lion.lady74: im sorry. i hope one day you can forgive me.

It is 5:47 a.m. Ryker sits on the edge of the couch. They reread Emma's last texts. They reread and reread and reread, like they’re looking for some hidden meaning they keep missing. Maybe the words will summon her here to answer all the questions they can't seem to ask. Or maybe the words will fall inert to the ground.

They eye the small laptop on the coffee table for a long moment, afraid to open it. But then, they need to take their own advice: there is no use hiding from something that is true. Her story is out there. Everyone's eyes will turn her way. The gaze of the world will eat her up like a pest, leaving the plant dying and brown in its wake, and she thinks she'll be able to come out of this whole. But Ryker knows better than anyone what it means to believe that right up until it’s not true anymore.

So they grab the laptop and go out into their garden to sit in quiet as the first hints of a coming dawn paint the world in soft hues. It's a carefully planned operation, with the crutches and the laptop and managing both, but Ryker is a master of the front-pack, as Emma christened it. Moving from living room to kitchen only takes five more steps of organization than the usual android, rather than the....more....that it used to be. Before they learned how to maneuver on one leg.

They settle on their patio chair, the favored one with the daisy-patterned pillows that have somehow survived the Detroit elements. Emma got it for them, and they will take it with them wherever it is they end up going. Ryker. Alone.

 _No time to think about that now._ They take a deep breath and smell the roses and the snapdragons, soon to wilt in the summer sun. They open the computer to see what damage has been done. Emma got them this laptop so they could watch their shows while sitting in the garden. She moved the WiFi router so they could stream things without issue.

She…

 _You're just a project to her. Something she can fix in a falling-down house._ Except Ryker won't let any human fix them, not even Emma. Maybe life would be easier if they let her. They should do the correct android thing and repair their leg, but something still stops them, a fear like ice against their spine. But also an indignation; they shouldn't have to be anything except what they are. Isn’t that what freedom is about?

Do humans know what it is like, to have freedom dropped in your lap? Some must. Some must still wonder, somewhere, but they’re probably all here already, helping the Volunteer Corps. And one of them, Emma, their Emma, no longer their Emma, uses her freedom to throw herself on the pyre.

They open the Detroit Free Press site to the doe eyes of a three-year-old Emma -- curly auburn hair cropped to her ears, skin yellowy and wan, freckles constant. She stares at the camera utterly flabbergasted, like it had caught her doing something she shouldn't be. Her eyes almost glow.

**_A LIFE HAYWIRE:_ **

_Cyberlife inspired a decade of innovation. But that innovation was built on the back of a survivor of dangerous cybernetic experiments. Her name is Emma Ibori. She was age 3._

Their biocomponents click and _squeeze_. They've seen this picture before now, but only in momentary snippets. That was all that they could afford, unless they wanted to spend an afternoon in inexplicable tears. But now, as they confront the picture in its final print, the tears become extraordinarily explicable. Ryker will never know what it is like to be that small. Ryker will only understand what it is like to be that tiny and helpless from reading this story about it happening to this person that they love -- this person who somehow grew from that, like an oak from an acorn. They reach out to touch the screen and the picture zooms in slightly, making Ryker's vision blur.

They're too different. It's too much. How could they ever have thought that it could work, them being best of friends for as long as they both would live? Emma grows on and on and on and Ryker is just here, waiting in the garden for dawn.

Ryker loses track of time reading the story. Suddenly they hear the telltale creaking of their backdoor opening. 7:00 a.m. on the dot. Emma, harried and true, and Connor, frustratingly impeccable. They are followed by Chase in his duck pajamas and Messi in her long nightgown, both of them coming from Ryker's bedroom. The sight is jarring and lovely; a splash of unexpected color in a flower bed. And everyone is on time. Connor is good for something.

Emma stares at Ryker, with a fear not dissimilar from the picture on the tablet. "What's the damage?"

"It's..."

The words die on their tongue. Her face is pale except where it’s flushed red, her fingers subconsciously twining in anxious knots.

How are they going to do this right? Where do you go, once you leave an anchor behind in a world that won't stop changing?

"There’s no damage,” they lie. “Not yet.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we're back!!! Let me know what you think!
> 
> Ryker is owned by @popsicletheduck  
> Sam is owned by @masqvia  
> Chase is owned by @caitlynmellark  
> Messi is owned by Medic
> 
> If you like this story and its veritable army of OCs, join us in the ['a garden in detroit' discord](https://discord.gg/TcDeeJP)!


	2. the shadows are cast

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He does not have an intuition program, so much, but he can form hypothesis after gathering data. Many pieces of evidence coalesce together at once. The thought appears, as if imported from elsewhere: _I want to marry Emma Ibori. The way humans do it._

Emma yanks her work bag out of the passenger seat and slams the car shut with a crisp _chunk_. The weight of her tools clanging against her hip is an old comfort — a sort of blanket against the early hour and the looming realization that she'll soon be seen on TVs across the whole of Detroit.  
  
Right now, she's just a carpenter hanging up some cabinets for a friend off the clock.  
  
Emma opens the back passenger door and Ryker slips out of the back seat with a sigh. "You're lucky I'm a morning person.”  
  
"You're up earlier than this on a good day."  
  
Ryker snorts a small laugh, but they don't say anything more. The nature of _this_ day is pretty unspoken, and Emma is glad they don't have to talk about it.  
  
Ryker leans against their crutches. Their wheelchair is folded in Emma's trunk, but they don't need it until they get to the station. "The lilacs are finally fading..." they note. "But there are others coming in." She can see them do the calculation in their head over whether they can tend to the flowers once the nominal greetings are over. Her bet is on yes.

Emma knocks three times softly on Anjali's door.  
  
Birds sing softly in this sleepy suburb. Trees line the streets. It’s one of those nice places where things don’t happen, which she is glad for. Anjali deserves it.

Emma waits for a full 20 seconds and there is no answer at all.

"Anji?" she calls out, knocking again on the door, harder this time. Anjali hated her doorbell — one of those various android PTSD situations Emma works hard to steer clear of — so Emma instead tries the handle.

It’s unlocked.

She glances to Ryker, who watches her with a furrowed brow. She shrugs, nonchalant, but Ryker doesn’t move from her side just yet. _I can read you like a book,_ they like to tease, and it’s likely even truer now. She could no better bite back a grimace or stop a furious glare than she could swim through dirt or stop time.

"Stay out here," she says, gruff.

Ryker heavily levels their gaze at her. “Maybe she forgot,” they say, but it’s more a joke than a real suggestion.

She pushes her way inside before Ryker can say anything else.

Emma knows this house better than the small one she rents for herself. She helped rebuild and paint its walls, stain its wood floors, affix its appliances in the kitchen. Emma didn’t understand that request at first. Why would Anjali need a new oven or refrigerator or anything? Why not use the sunny space for something else?

“So I can cook when you visit me,” was Anjali’s response. “You and the DVC.” The ease of her answer had tripped Emma into a deep, warm silence. Emma lives like a vagrant but she builds the house of her dreams bit by bit in the homes of other people.

(Even though...she does dream…

A big house in the country, where birds and cats roam and the garden teems with life and she never has to face another human in a crowded train ever again…)

She enters the white-walled kitchen, bright with morning sunshine, to see Anjali sobbing at the blue breakfast nook table.

Emma slides her bag off her shoulder. It clatters into a deflated blob. “Anji, are you—”

The woman suddenly rises, pushing her red chair back in a woody screech. She’s dressed in a cheerful yellow sundress and cardigan, but her dark hair is undone and her face is streaked with tears. Emma eyes the table and catches sight of a tablet. On it is a picture of her own face, at age 6…

Anjali is in front of Emma before she can react. The woman rests her shaky palms on Emma’s shoulders and then, slowly, her cheeks. Emma stands stunned, as if she’d been shot. Her chest vibrates with sudden, painful heat. She can’t speak.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Anjali whispers. Her warm amber eyes would be accusing if they didn’t shine with so much grief. “You kept this...just, inside you the whole time? All that?”

Emma can’t bring herself to even nod. “Mmm,” is all she can force from her throat.

Up this close, Anjali’s expressions blur. Her teeth flash in the shape of a grimace. The tears still roll, and Emma is struck by the desire to wipe them away just as she is seized by the fear of what will happen if she moves.

“I can’t believe — to a child!” Anjali sputters. “You were a baby!”

Emma manages a nod. But then Anjali seizes her in a hug.

“You’re _safe_ now,” Anjali says, and that is exactly where Emma’s ability to cope with this stops. Anjali rests her forehead on Emma’s shoulder and Emma has to take in a deep, deep breath to not tear up. “Okay? Alright? You’re never—-I’d never...oh, I just want to strangle the people who did this to you!”

Emma’s blood turns to ice.

“They should all pay,” Anjali continues. “I can’t believe…”

She’d never heard Anjali say something like that — ever. Not even in jest. Doubt seeds deep in Emma’s gut. What does it say about all this shit that one of the most peaceful androids she knows desires some sort of violence after reading her story?

She leans back and places her hands on Anjali’s shoulders, but they are still close enough that their foreheads nearly touch.

“Don’t go wildin’ on me here, Anj.” She injects levity into her tone with the painful force of an antibiotic shot.

Anjali makes a watery hiccup sound akin to a laugh. “People should be helping _you_ ,” she says. “Why do you spend all your free time doing more work?”

Emma tries to laugh back. It comes out in a single, choked ‘heh.’ “ _Sometimes_ a cabinet’s work,” Emma says. “Sometimes it’s a nice hobby.” Anjali opens her mouth to protest — but luckily her gaze is caught by a disturbance behind Emma.

“Oh, Ryker!” Anjali wipes her cheeks with the back of her hand. “I didn’t know you’d come with.”

Emma turns around to see that Ryker had indeed ignored her directive to stay outside. They watch, mouth pursed in a thin line, no guilt at all over being caught. Emma can tell the smile that forms on their face is fake. Anjali, luckily, cannot.

Anjali pleasantly asks after the state of her garden and offers Emma decaf coffee three times. Ryker goes back outside to tend to the nascent flowerbeds. Emma goes to work on fixing the cabinets, but strangeness sticks like sawdust to her skin. Anjali has joined the ranks of those who hover around her as if at any moment she might shatter into a thousand pieces of cold glass. She watches Emma work with wringing hands and lingers a touch too close.

By the time Emma settles back into her car, she feels heavier than before. She leans her head back against the headrest and lets out a long sigh.

“Didn’t go like you thought?” Ryker asks gently.

“I...didn’t think…”

“Hmm...”

She lets the deserved zing pass without comment. “I didn’t...I guess I kind of forgot that people might...be mad about what happened? Like really mad. Like...the opposite of…’let’s talk this out’ kind of mad.”

Ryker leans forward. She eyes them in the rearview mirror. Their eyes are an unforgiving frosty blue.

“They should be mad, Em.” Their voice is quiet. “What did you expect?”

* * *

 

 _This is it_ , she thinks. _I really am the dumbest shit on earth._

Emma steps into the Channel 16 green room, which is never green like the name. It’s just some fancy waiting room with dark leather furniture that smells like burned coffee, and it is where the reality of her situation settles like grounds at the bottom of a cup.

Ryker, beside her in their wheelchair, pats her wrist and then rolls toward a TV silently showing what is being produced across the hall. Connor crosses the room to her like a magnet, leaving Markus and that blonde woman, Sam, behind without a word. He stands close enough that their chests nearly touch as he reaches for her hands. He searches her face silently. She nods.

She feels better seeing him. He had to come early for an interview about the android rights package — currently being branded as Fair and Equitable Engagement Laws for Android-kind (FEEL for Android-kind. Yeah, Emma had to hide a laugh at that one). But something feels wrong. She is the one who begged Ryker to come with her to Anjali’s, unable to bear going alone. She is the one who is afraid to sit in small, enclosed places alone anymore. Ryker acquiesced, but that is all they did.

She doesn’t feel like they wanted to do it.

Something is happening to Ryker and she can’t get through. She doesn’t know how to. She doesn’t know how to let it go, either, so it simmers just beneath her heart, burning everything.

“You’ll do fine,” Connor says. “I’ll be right here if anything happens.”

“Yeah,” she grunts. She places a careful hand on his chest, splaying her fingers out where his heart would be. “You can’t stop me from embarrassing myself on live TV.”

She manages to somehow say it even as her heart leaps into her throat.

He smiles. “I’ve done impossible things before.”

She squints at his perfect little shirt buttons. _I am not charming or fun or cute like a kid. I’m coarse and cuss a lot and hate talking to people and oh my god what the hell am I getting myself into._

“Emma?”

Emma jolts. She looks immediately to her left, where Sam watches them with a carefully neutral expression.

“Yeah?”

Sam is dressed as an impeccable shadow in a black pencil skirt and blazer. She smiles gently, ignoring the gratuitous display of affection between Emma and Connor with notable grace. “I don’t think I’ve actually introduced myself. I’m Sam Hale.” She extends a hand, which Emma takes, turning so her shoulder brushes Connor’s chest. The woman’s grip is firm. Her eyes are unreadable.

“Emma Ibori. You...know that, already.”

Sam chances a glance at Connor. “I had a guess.” She returns her russet gaze fully upon Emma with an amused lilt to her mouth. “He’s not like that with everyone. Sadly for a good three-quarters of the Congressional intern class.”

Emma smiles, and Sam’s smile grows in turn.

“What do you mean?” Connor asks, legitimately confused, which prompts both women to share a laughing look.

“Later.” Sam’s friendly dismissal of Connor is so casual that Emma feels instantly at ease. “Have you ever done something like this before?”

Emma looks down at her emerald green, rayon blouse that Anjali insisted on lending her. It fit tightly across her chest, but it was better than what she had brought, which was black and sweaty. Her trousers still fit oddly on her legs.

“Okay,” Sam says, taking the nonverbal hint for what it is. She gestures Emma to follow her. “Well, you don’t need to worry. Connor told me you’ve been studying up. On yourself.”

Emma follows Sam to the table with a continental breakfast spread. “It’s complicated.”

“God, don’t we all know it. Coffee?”

Emma is shocked into another smile. Sam makes herself a coffee, unbothered. _Don’t we all know it. You spilled your guts to the whole world and now we’re gonna divine the omens from it. Don’t worry though._ Her blase tone — sarcasm or not — is grounding.

Emma casts a quick glance to Connor, who is speaking with Ryker but keeping an eye toward her.

“I’m good,” Emma says.

“So you got some stats and figures. Connor was telling me.” Sam stirs just a touch of cinnamon into her coffee. “DVC volunteer numbers are up, humans are returning to Detroit in a slowly gathering trickle and more HAIT program volunteers are signing up every day. That’s good.” She turns to Emma.

“Are you gonna tell me to be myself?” Emma asks, before she can stop herself.

Sam smiles in such a way that Emma thinks she’s taken her by surprise, too. “Tired of that one?”

“A bit.”

Sam blows over the edge of her cup and leans against the table. “It’s an emotional story. You’re allowed to have some emotion. In fact, it’d probably be a good idea.”

Emma purses her lips and trains her gaze on a chocolate croissant. That’s the problem. She’s tired of having emotions about this. Most of them are angry and ugly.

“I’m not a very pretty crier,” she mutters.

“Is anyone?”

Their sudden shared look toward the androids in the room forces Emma to swallow down a weird laugh.

“That’s what makeup’s for,” Sam says, nonchalant. “Their guy will be in here soon for you.”

Emma blanches. “Makeup.”

Sam smiles as she tests her coffee, then winces at its heat. “I guess you’ve never had to worry about it with that perfect skin of yours.”

“My—what?”

Connor suddenly appears, grabbing the croissant she has been eyeing. “I’ll save this for you,” he says softly, laying his other hand on her shoulder. “The prep team is here.”

Emma shares one last look with Sam, who raises her eyebrows in silent assent over _something_ , before she is swept into a human conveyor belt that has little to no requirement for her input. Some man with mint breath brushes some cold creams on her face while another woman attaches a mic box to her belt and a wireless lav mic to her collar. Emma keeps her eyes on Connor, who stays resolutely close. Sam lingers not far behind, typing on her phone with one hand. Ryker moves from the silent TV in the green room to sit just behind Sam, watching intently.

She thinks about these concrete things and resolutely ignores the flashing bits of text starting to appear in her vision. Stress response, she’s realized by now. Identify threats. Gather knowledge. Defeat the enemy, whatever it may be.

_Get out of that cycle._

She looks intently enough upon Connor that he takes a step toward her, as if anticipating her need.

“Do you think I would like D.C.?” She tries to ask as if taken by a whim. He watches her carefully, hands clasped behind his back. A tenderness he reserves for her softens his eyes as he mulls a response.

“You would hate where I work. Many stuffy people in suits surrounded by office buildings.”

“Hey,” Sam scolds without any heat, still preoccupied with her phone. He smirks.

“You'd like the rest of it,” he allows quietly. “Lots of old, restored rowhouses. None of the houses look exactly the same, if you go to the right place...”

Emma focuses on that. “Maybe I’ll come with you next visit. Just for a little bit.”

His smile is taken aback, which makes it more beautiful. “I would like that.” It falters for a moment. “You...would have to fly…”

“I’m sure there are trains between here and there. I’ll just leave early.”

She thinks about that. A train ride to her beloved so she didn’t go crazy. She could do that. Take a week out of work. She had some paid vacation saved up since she couldn’t technically use it in her forced sabbatical at the end of last year. Airplanes still felt out of the question, like they always had been, so that’s not new. But a train ride through the Great Lakes? Any old fool could do that.

The commotion around her reaches near unbearable heights. People move with swiftness, prompting threat percentage counters to enter her vision. Brightness pounds just behind her eyes. Breathe. Remember to breathe.

 _My name is Emma Ibori. I am 26 years old. Almost 27. I’ve lived through more shit than I can count. I killed a man who tried to take me away._ Her fist clenches. _I can do one interview facing a goddamn camera._

“Miss Ibori?” some assistant says. “This way.”

She looks in a panic to Ryker, who has said nothing since they entered the green room with her, but she is already being pushed out the door by the velocity of the people around her. She sees them open their mouth, but she misses what they had to say.

Something in her stomach turns to stone.

“I’ll be in your eye line,” Connor says as they walk. He is straightforward, all business. She enters the studio and she’s struck by how much it reminds her of a dollhouse. Dark floors everywhere hide cords and the dirty rigmarole that allows the vibrant bright news desk set to stand out like stained glass — the art everyone is here to see.

As it goes with things like this, it is a lot of hurry up and wait. Emma, Connor and Sam are bundled to the sidelines only to be left there for awhile as the broadcast continues on. Her interview is part of the 10 am bloc.

“Kamski sends his regards,” Connor whispers to her. His tone is dry. “Chloe just messaged me.”

She nods, or she think she does because her vision is moving a little, but no. She’s just shaking like a leaf.

“What did Ryker say to me?” she asks.

“When?”

“Just now, in the room.”

“Ryker...didn’t say anything,” Connor says.

She pushes her anxiety down like a big, finicky balloon that won’t stop rolling from under her palms. She leans into Connor and his hand settles between her shoulders but nothing stops the shaking seizing her whole body.

_I’m going to make everything worse, somehow. I’m ruining everything. No one will care about the androids. They’re just going to be angry. And there’s no good in that. No use…_

Commercial break.

“Emma, look at me.”

Emma turns toward Sam, partly in surprise. Her hair is pulled up into a severe bun and there’s nothing warm in her expression, but her uncompromising gaze is useful. Like a slap in the face for a hysterical patient.

“You’re already here. You can’t take it back. You might as well do what you can. Right?”

Emma, despite everything, nods.

Right.

Someone gestures to her to come onto the set. She glances to the too bright lights, unsure how she is supposed to sit under there for a good 10 minutes. Would her makeup melt off?

She steps up onto the platform and—

_Wait—_

Gravity shifts. She can feel the change in the air.

She lingers in place until someone waves her back off the set. One of the producers yells something about a new wire report, to keep it on commercial. People start running the opposite way — truly running, tablets in hand.

_We don’t have it yet._

_Someone’s on CTN!_

_Are the — oh fuck._

Sam pulls out her phone. “Hale. What is it?” Her heels click as she steps away. Connor suddenly has Emma’s shoulder in a vice grip, tugging her tightly against him. She wonders if she really lost it this time.

“What’s going on?” she stammers.

He pulls her in against his chest. “Just stay here with me.”

She leans against his chest. His regulator beats faster as his head swivels. Seeking an escape route, she realizes. Sam speaks quietly into her phone.

_Let me through! Emma!_

Ryker.

Emma whirls at once, toward the hall leading back to the green room. Ryker is waving people away from them, trying to get into the studio, but runners are in the way and their chair has a hard time maneuvering the chaos. She stumbles toward Ryker, essentially dragging Connor with her, and seizes Ryker’s extended hand like a lifeline.

Ryker scans her face, as if to ensure nothing had happened in the few minutes they were separated. How did she expect to do this with Ryker in another room? Honestly. “An android woman,” they start, “she’s...there’s something on the TVs...she’s…”

Someone’s fingers snap behind them. Emma turns toward Sam, who’s pointing toward one of the feed monitors toward the back of the studio. Sam, still on the phone, herds them all that way — Emma and Connor and Ryker, a strange, three-pronged symbiotic creature.

Emma watches the feed. Michael Webb settles into his chair, tablet in hand, looking harried. It feels as if she’s somehow unlocked a secret TV channel other people don’t get to see.

_Back on air in 5! 4! 3…_

“This just in,” Webb says in his familiar voice, looking more like the real deal now. “There’s been an explosion at Woodward Mall Center…”

_Woodward Mall?_

_Woodward Mall, where Chase works?_

“What did he say?” Emma asks, breathless.

“Does Chase work today?” Ryker asks in near the same moment.

Connor watches in silence.

“...no word on casualties, but emergency services are on the scene—”

The feed cuts out. For a moment, there’s nothing.

Then a woman appears on the screen.

Ryker points. “That’s her—”

“Humans of Detroit. My name is Lyssa. This...is a warning.”

A woman glares at the screen, her brows angled and fierce. One half of her face is typical android perfection, tawny-toned and smooth and lightly freckled. An LED spins yellow in her temple. The other half of her face prompts Emma to gasp. The smooth, liquid-like nature of her android skin struggles to fully reach the entirety of her left half, mottled like bubbly magma. Some spots have shimmering semi-skin; other spots reveal the inner black and blue of the android inner skeleton. Her left optical unit is completely gone. It looks as though someone melted off half of her face.

Silence descends. It is the dead of summer, but the sudden hush reminds Emma of snow.

“Some of our kind want you to think we’re all willing to sit by and forget what you’ve done. Some of us don’t have that luxury.

Some of us think you should suffer.”

Emma’s grip on Connor tightens.

“Now, I don’t think that. I’ve counseled against it. Because all we really want — not that we had ever been given a choice in our existence — is to live life on our own terms. Away from you. Does that not sound fair to you? Fair...and equitable.”

She feels Connor stiffen behind her. Her stomach flips.

“Fuck,” Sam mutters.

“Detroit is our birthing cradle and I think it is only _fair_ ...that we get to have it. The city in exchange for our continued peaceful co-existence would be a _fair_ compromise on your part. The horrors we have experienced at your hands are only a fraction of the evil you have done as a species, and I think it would only be _fair_...if you began your repentance by paying reparations to your children.

The ones you _hurt._ The ones you _forgot._

Give us Detroit. Or we will take it. Because that’s what is _fair._

We are the Untold. We will be heard.”

The video cuts out and kicks to dead air. Emma breathes in suddenly through her nose. Sound and commotion comes rushing back like she’d been underwater. She takes stock:

Connor has her shoulder in a vice grip, but he’s speaking to someone, maybe Sam. _Where’s Markus? Is he alright?_ He’s thrown into action, yet afraid to leave her side. That’s not so unusual. Sam speaks softly back. Producers and writers run behind her, shouting codes and inputs to each other.

But Ryker scares her.

They are staring at the screen still, jaw clenched, eyes wide. Do they see something she can’t in the dead space of the broadcast? For all she knows, that woman...that Lyssa...could be disrupting android brains through a secret signal. She rationalizes her worry away as something mechanical. A function issue.

She knows better.

{Noah. Just say his name. Noah. Noah. Noah. You and him, ghosts watching across the fuzz of distance. The pain of seeing yourself in the eyes of someone you hate. You’ve seen it. You know it. You know _me._ }

Ryker suddenly jolts in their chair. Emma leans in until they look at her. They seem shocked to remember she’s there.

“Messi’s calling me,” they say, as if awakening from a strange dream.

“Weird,” she says. But then, that is Messi’s way. Her implanted phone device no longer functions, so Emma got her a physical phone that Messi commonly uses to accidentally butt-dial her entire household when out and about. Ryker’s LED spins yellow as they answer the call.

_Ryker. Ryker! I don’t know where Chase is._

She is loud enough through Ryker’s temple speaker (as they are blessedly allowing it to be semi-broadcast) that Emma can hear with near crystal clarity.

“You...can’t find Chase? Messi, slow down. Where are you?”

_Where Chase work! Big mall!_

Emma’s muscles seize up. Connor’s iron-like grip on her shoulders keeps her in place. “Not yet,” he whispers to her, but how could that be possible? Messi is tiny. Messi may have once been an emergency response android but she is wandering about a mall _where a terrorist attack just took place._

“Messi,” Ryker pleads and scolds. “Get out of there right now. Go home!”

_I going to surprise him at work! But...something scary happened...smoke..._

“ _Melissa._ ” Ryker’s voice breaks on her name. They run a hand down their face. “We’re on our way home, okay, and we need you to be there. Okay?”

Panic grips Emma like a beast’s claws. “Tell her to—!”

_No! Have to find Chase! Something...something bad happened!_

“You can’t...Messi!” Ryker slams a fist into their lap. “Listen to me—”

_No! No! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!_

“Baby?" Emma's chest feels raw.

Ryker stares in horror as her No’s turn into wordless shrieks of fury and fear.

_NOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA—_

It keeps going. And going.

“It’s okay, baby, we’re coming! It’s gonna be okay!” She and Ryker move as one. They barrel toward the doors, all else forgotten. Connor follows, hand slipping down to Emma’s wrist to keep up as they run.

“Where are we going?” is Connor’s quiet assent.

The trio is nearly to the station atrium when Messi’s cries become words.

_Chase! Look at me! You must wake up! Chase! CHASE!_

* * *

 

The trio arrives at the android repair center, interview forgotten.  
  
"Sam is taking care of it," Connor says softly in the taxi when she thinks to ask. "Focus on this."  
  
Emma doesn't remember how they got here. If someone asked her what had happened in the past 20 minutes, she couldn't say. Panic colors everything in disappearing ink.    
  
The android repair center is an old American Health doctor office complex, refitted to better accommodate both comfortable maintenance and emergency repair. Entering the main building gives her the same white coat anxiety as going to the hospital. They are eventually directed to a sunny waiting room on the top floor where others wait for androids caught in the blast. Emma sits, elbows on her knees, head in her hands, trying to breathe. Ryker sits in front of her, hand hooked around her elbow. Connor sits in the chair next to her, handling business on his phone.  
  
They wait. Luckily, the TV in the room is off. None of them say anything in the silence, strangely comfortable as it is. Emma isn’t sure how much time passes before she is prompted to look up.

"They're right over there," Hank gruffs.  
  
"Ryker! Miss Emma!"

Suddenly, a mass of long, black hair and a too-large cream sweater emerge from behind Hank's leg. Emma rises just in time to receive Messi in a massive hug. The small MP200 bursts into tears instantly, arms tight around Emma's middle. Emma squeezes back, just as hard, but keeps her own tears inside. It'll only make Messi feel worse.

"I got you, cupcake."

"Mi-miss Emma, th-the...th-the mall s-s-so scary, I thought Chase _die._ "

"I know." She rubs Messi's back. Her leaky, broken eye leaves a blue stain on Emma's green shirt that smells like bleach.

"Hey Messi," Ryker says softly, putting their hand on her back, too. "You're okay."

Messi whirls, launching herself into Ryker's lap. Ryker's eyes widen and they give a small _oof_ , but when Emma moves to pluck Messi away, Ryker shakes their head. Their arms wrap around her and hold her tightly. It's enough of a crisis that they'll allow this.

Emma looks to Hank. Connor is already up and standing by him, placing a bracing hand on the old man's shoulder.

"They couldn't get much out of her except for 'where is Chase' and 'want to see Chase,' but...we did what we could," he says to Connor.

"I know," Connor says softly. "We’ll solve this, Hank."

"Not sure it's one to be solved so much," Hank says, crossing his arms. "You okay?"

Emma only realizes he is speaking to her because he raises an eyebrow when she doesn't say anything. But she doesn't have time to answer before an android nurse calls the group name — "Ibori family?"

_Ibori family._

Connor stays back with Hank as she silently trails behind the nurse, Ryker and Messi by her side. ("Chase does not like me, if I recall," Connor said in the car, and unfortunately, he is still right.) She is not sure she gets in a full breath until she sees Chase, alert and sitting up on a cushioned gurney, a soft blanket over his legs. He sits up taller upon seeing them.

"Ibori!" he says, relieved. "You guys are okay…"

“Chase!” Messi squeals. She scrambles from Ryker’s side to stand to the right of Chase’s gurney. Ryker looks on, smiling softly.

"Of course we’re okay, you big doof," Emma says, voice wobbly. She moves to stand on the opposite side as Messi and takes his hand at once. Chase scans her face.

"I thought maybe — I had no idea...wait." He squints at her. "Are you wearing makeup?"

She touches her face, then thanks God and all his damned minions that her face is dry. Still,  her fingers still come away smeared with something shimmery. "For the interview…"

"It's bad," Chase informs her.

She’s shocked into laughter. "Well, eff you too!"

"They didn’t even get your skin tone right."

She laughs again, too relieved to be embarrassed. "It’s a good thing you’re cute."

Chase squeezes her hand. He finally cracks a smile, even if his eyes suddenly can’t meet hers.

"What happened?" Ryker asks softly. "Are you feeling okay?"

"Uh. I am functional, at least," Chase says, non-committal. "They said the...concussive force of the bomb mucked with some of my systems but there was no EMP damage so I feel okay, mostly. Just a few warnings. Some...burns…there were humans nearby who...had it much worse. It is not the first explosion I’ve survived."

_What?_

His free hand clutches the blanket and Emma has to look out a nearby window to recollect herself.

(Can she really not protect them, ever? Is everything she ever loved always at risk like this, all the time? What kind of freak occurrence — the act of a woman purporting to _protect androids_ — nearly took Chase away from them? What did she do to deserve that? What did any of them _do?)_

{You handed a weapon to a people who don’t have the context for fury. To people who don’t understand the long-term cost.}

"Emma."

She turns back to them at Ryker’s soft prod. Pulling her out of...wherever she was going.

"Are you going to be okay?" she manages to ask Chase.

"Androids don’t heal, Ibori," Chase says calmly. "I am merely undergoing tests before they finish the...skin corrections. I’m okay."

Androids don’t heal. Right. The gurney is more for comfort than necessity. For dignity rather than bodily exhaustion. But she needs Chase to heal, she realizes quietly. She needs the proof that he is recovering and well. She can’t help but project her human experience on them all, all the time, and maybe there’s something wrong there. Maybe—

"Chase!" an unfamiliar voice peals.

Emma turns at once toward a very tall, striking woman with spinning yellow LED. Her hair is long, in a soft ombre from brown to blonde on the ends. Her face is soft though her jawline is well-defined, and her hazel dark eyes are large and bright — textbook pretty, but with just enough character to make Emma’s heart slam against her ribs. She’s followed by another android man, quiet with an uncertain frown, dressed in a somewhat formal vest and button-up. A scar from what looks like a shattered jaw mars his left cheek. His LED spins red.

"...Wanda," Chase breathes. A heavy moment passes. "And...Alphonse…"

Emma blinks. "Um. Friends of yours?"

Friends he has never spoken of before now. Friends that care enough to rush to the repair center almost as quickly as her and Ryker. Something unsettles in her gut, like a rock disturbed at the bottom of a lake.

"Hey Chase," the one named Alphonse says quietly. He hangs back by the door.

"Oh, Chase...a human?" Wanda asks, head tilting a bit dramatically. Her hair falls in waves as she observes Emma and Chase holding hands.

"This is Emma Ibori," Chase says, using her first name for the first time in months. "And Ryker and Messi. They’re my roommates...well, not Ibori. But Ibori has...helped me."

Emma raises her free hand warily. She tries to smile but it feels choked. Wanda doesn’t seem to notice the tension; her smile suddenly turns beaming as she approaches Emma, looking down into Emma’s face with nary a care. Emma blinks away the threat calculator that suddenly appears in her vision.

"Thank you _so much,_  Emma. Chase and I are...we’re the last ones, you know?" Emma does not know, but Wanda provides no explanation. "We try to look out for each other...gosh, you have such pretty eyes. Did you know that?" She laughs cheerily. "I’m so glad to finally meet you. I think I might already love you!"

Emma reaches a shaky hand up to touch her own face again, this time near her eyes. The only clearly inhuman part about her. For some reason, in spite of Wanda’s clear, infectious joy and too-actually-genuine declaration of affection, Emma suddenly feels claustrophobic. Her lungs constrict.

It’s like a whole other part of the world just opened up. The last? The last what? Who are these people? What did Chase not want her to know about?

"Thanks, honey," she says, by rote. Wanda’s smile never dims, not even as Emma begins to slowly pull away. She steps out into the hall, muttering excuses about needing to find something to eat before anyone can ask after her. But she stands under the fluorescents, lost. The hallway is bright and sterile and completely empty.

She leans her forehead against the wall when she remembers there would be no vending machines here.

Androids don’t need stuff like that. In this case, she’s the odd one out.

* * *

 

He should have been prepared for this.

Connor listens in to the latest press roundtable about the terrorism investigation from his phone. Simon provides updates as he has them to their press contacts — though at this stage, they have little more than what’s already been reported. One of the Free Press reporters speaks up.

"Do you think this has any connection to the Emmaline Ibori story that ran in Detroit Today?"

"No," Simon answers. "We don’t have any information on that at this time," he adds, "but we’re fairly certain the timing is simply...unfortunate."

"Do you have any updated comment regarding that story that ran today?"

"Our original statement still stands," Simon says. "We support shining a light on truth and we’re glad that Miss Ibori finally felt safe enough to come forward. A terrorist attack doesn’t change that."

Connor rubs his temples.

It changes it for _him_ , a little bit.

Emma is in the guest room of her small house, managing everyone into complacency. "You’re gonna sleep in a bed tonight, Chase," she says.

Her voice is calm and even and brooks no resistance. She should be in bed, too. He should be off this phone and…out there, gathering evidence? Bundling her up and forcing her to sleep, alongside everyone else in this house? He taps his fingers on his bobbing knee, unable to sit still — and yet sitting still is all he can do. Sitting here and fielding calls from the president’s people and Congress’s people and explaining yet again that yes, like any group of _people_ , androids can have vastly differing politics in how they interact with humanity.

But then, he had never counted on a reaction like this since Markus’ rise. The guilt seeps like bad thirium. He should have _expected_ this.

"Ibori. You’re being ridiculous."

"Really? Me telling you to sleep in a queen-sized bed is too oppressive for you?"

Ryker gives a small snort of a laugh. Messi is humming loud enough that Connor can hear it from here. And Emma is in her element — managing the needs of others until her own are smothered into nonexistence.

"We will not all fit," Chase insists.

"You haven’t even tried yet, ya damn hussy."

"A hussy would know more about beds than a carpenter."

Emma tries not to laugh. "Whatever. You're still sleeping in it."

Connor receives an update from Sam. The FBI doesn’t have anything yet outside of forensic data on the explosion — a classic garden-variety backyard bomb. The DPD is similarly unresponsive. He sends the update to Markus.

<We probably won’t get much else tonight,> Markus says over uplink. <Doesn’t make me feel better about it.>

<Agreed.>

The Untold claims it was an attack on the humans of Detroit and yet that attack had no care for the androids it killed. Unforgivably messy as a statement. And for what?

He should be out there. He should be doing _something_ — anything other than this politicking.

But then again, he was never meant for such a weight. He should not be worrying about the future of an entire species. Once upon a time, he had been made for a task with an end goal.

(And that would have been that, a dark part of him whispers.)

Emma emerges from the guest room. She slowly closes the door, keeping her back to Connor as if afraid to show him her face.

Maybe small scale cases and drunk lieutenants and anxious carpenters are the problems he should stick with.

<Are you okay handling the next press junket alone?> he asks Markus.

<I was waiting for you to ask,> Markus says. <I'll divert all calls our way the rest of the night. Take care of them.>

Connor nods slightly, though it is unnecessary.

Emma looks to the floor, back still turned to Connor, hands clenching at her sides as if readying for battle. But then she suddenly spins and stomps toward him. She walks, undeterred, until she is toe-to-toe with him. Anyone else walking like that, he would treat as a threat.

She stares up at his face, scanning. Looking for something. He can’t meet her gaze. He doesn’t want her to subsume herself in the problems he can’t unravel. He wonders, for a moment, if perhaps it would be easier if she didn’t care at all.

And then, so gently, she puts a hand against his cheek. He leans into the touch. His optical units heat up.

"You okay?" she asks.

For a moment, the self-flagellation stops. He bites his lip.

"You can't fix it all in one night," she whispers. "Trust me on that one."

He meets her eyes. "It feels like I could. If I worked hard enough."

Her brows furrow. "It’s like a bad house, darlin’. You fix one thing fast and another thing falls down. That’s why you take it slow. Do it right."

"I should have guessed this would happen."

"What, terrorism?"

"No, the...androids, we...of course not everyone would necessarily agree with our law package. But I...I thought we did what we could. I thought we were on the right track. I thought…"

He doesn’t know what to think, other than the fact he had just spent three weeks away from his home only for it to collapse in his absence. Maybe the deviant hunter should have remained where he belonged — finding people who hurt others. Hurting them back. Markus wants to approach with a conciliatory hand. He wants to try and talk to Lyssa. Like always. Connor isn’t convinced they can do that, given what happened.

He realizes, after too long a moment, that Emma is watching him in silence.

"I’m sorry," he says. He places a hand over hers on his face. "That’s not—is everything alright? With Chase?"

Emma purses her lips a moment. Her thumb brushes his cheekbone. "It’s fine. We’re fine. You...aren’t."

He looks to the floor.

"Tell me what you’re thinking about," she says softly.

He cannot. "Just my job," he says. "Like always."

"Is there anything I can do?"

He shifts his gaze to meet hers. _Love me,_ he nearly whispers. He doesn’t like the desperation. That doesn’t erase the fact that it is there.

Instead, he leans in and kisses her on the corner of her mouth. He takes a selfish moment to linger there. "Go lay in bed," he says against her skin, "so I can stop calculating the exact moment that you will collapse from exhaustion."

He feels her mouth twist up in a smirk. "Hmm. Worrier," she accuses. But she leans suddenly against his chest, palms against where his ribs would be. Her shoulders finally lose their tension. He holds her there, one hand on her back to count her heartbeats. One...five...ten. And then she whispers, so softly: "I’m so glad you're here."

He does not have an intuition program, so much, but he can form hypothesis after gathering data. Many pieces of evidence coalesce together at once. The thought appears, as if imported from elsewhere: _I want to marry Emma Ibori. The way humans do it._

He smooths her hair to stop his hand from shaking. "I'll be in soon, I promise."

She goes to her room and shuts the door. He gathers up his cache of tablets and research notes and tries not to stutter into a reset from the heat of the realization.

He knows what marriage is. He has an understanding of what humans think of when they think of marriage. White dresses, men in suits. Sheaths of flowers, shining rings. Promises bound by God — some God, any God. Any would do.

For him...any would do.  

He interrogates that thought as he organizes his tablet files with a careful, measured pace. Humans put faith in any number of things; whether the humans ended up being right did not seem to matter in regards to whether those things were _true._ If nothing truly matters — and if life is, as some say, little more than randomness — the acts required of belief make belief truer than anything.

In other words: If he believed that some metabeing, existent or not, could give him and Emma a chance at being tied together for their entire conscious existence, perhaps the very act of following through with that belief — marrying her, in front of everyone — would make it true. No one would be able to doubt the depth of his intent. No one could take that away.

He is not a betting man. He does not like to take risks.

If he had to get a priest to anoint this, he would do it. If doing the song and dance would guarantee a modicum of anything at all, he would do it and do it gladly. But these are known things; his thirium pump still rages as if he’s confronted a task he cannot complete.

What will it take to stay with Emma like that?

Can he even do that?

Does it even matter?

He has stopped breathing. Electricity travels through his shoulders, down his arms, into his fingers. The tablet seems to vibrate in his shaking hands. He has to _do_ something about this. But what is there to do? There are no hypothesis to test. He cannot die to prove a theory.

[...]

[INCOMING CALL]

[UNKNOWN CALLER. ACCEPT?]

He blinks at the text in his vision. Odd. He doesn’t get many random calls direct anymore, particularly not from those savvy enough to hide their numbers from his auto-search protocols. He accepts the call out of a concern that something worse has happened.

"Connor Anderson," he answers aloud.

"Connor Anderson! I find it really charming that you chose a last name. Good. I was afraid you wouldn’t answer."

He does not recognize the voice. "Who is this?"

"My name is Jason Graff. Board member for Cyberlife. I imagine you are very busy this evening."

[WARNING. DANGER.]

Connor rolls his hands up into fists. He somehow keeps his voice quiet. “May I ask the reason for this call?”

" _Connor._ "  The man clicks his tongue. "Let’s not pretend. You know why I’m calling."

"There are any number of reasons a Cyberlife executive would seek to call me on a personal line. I have few reasons to assume good will."

And the man on the other end...laughs. "You’re a real work of art. I always thought so."

Something slips through Connor’s code like a cockroach across a kitchen floor. His eye twitches.

"Alright, listen," the man continues. "I wanted you to know that I’ll be Cyberlife’s representative at the New Jericho meetings from now on. I think we can come to an understanding and avoid any further media catastrophes."

"By calling me at night?"

A huff, something like a laugh, maybe a cough. "I also wanted you to know...that I can help you. You and the human woman you’re always with. Emma."

The programmed fear response kicks in with such cold ferocity that he grabs the back of the sofa. "I don’t know what you—"

"I told you. I’m not here to pretend. You’ll find me a lot more interesting to talk to than the piece of floor lint that was our last representative."

The man’s voice is perfectly blase and charming as he places Connor in checkmate.

_If he knows, how much of Cyberlife knows?_

_Who knows about us? Who knows about her in connection to me? Who can use that?_

_What could he possibly want?_

_What does Cyberlife want?_

"Now," Jason says into the dead air. "What time is the meeting tomorrow, exactly? I don’t want to be late."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> masq: so does emma have any human friends?  
> me: *sweats*
> 
> huge thanks to @masqvia and @popsicletheduck for beta-ing my BS, as usual.
> 
> And the cast list...  
> Ryker is owned by @popsicletheduck  
> Sam is owned by @masqvia  
> Chase is owned by @caitlynmellark  
> Messi is owned by Medic  
> Wanda is owned by Cio, @suolasirotin on tumblr who also has amazing art!!  
> Alphonse is owned by Omii, @Sorceringing here on Ao3!
> 
> If you like this story and its veritable army of OCs, join us in the ['a garden in detroit' discord!](https://discord.gg/TcDeeJP)


	3. i'll bloody up my hands

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “That’s old crap. An old media game,” the aide says. “I don’t see how it’s relevant to either of us.”
> 
> “Of course not.” Jason raises an eyebrow. “You don’t live here so you don’t really care if the military storms in, guns blazing. It’s not really your problem if the first enemy engagement on American soil in nearly 100 years is in Detroit.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title from 'oh, sleeper' by the Oh Hellos (who have inspired most of, if not all, of the chapter titles thus far)

Right now, Emma is certain she is home — the single level ranch house in Iowa, where the sun comes in golden through the dust and the wind shakes the corn stalks until the leaves make music. Later on, she'll wonder how her brain assigns this sense of place to a home she lived in for only two years. She's so certain it’s home when she's here. In every dream, this is the place her mind summons when she wants to go somewhere she belongs.

A dizzy strangeness fills her chest. The curse is that she doesn't know she is in a dream. She never will — not until it is too late.

She sits in the old backyard on a swing tied to a nearby tree. She can't quite look up to see the sky, but she knows the clarity of its cornflower blue like she knows the inside of her own skull, which is to say —

Very well. Not well at all. Nothing makes sense here. It doesn't really make sense to say she knows the inside of her own skull since she'll never see —

"You're always late!" Noah yells, and she becomes angry. Her fists curl into tight balls around the scratchy rope. She thinks about growling. About baring her teeth like a wolf. She stands and the wooden swing is suddenly gone, though she still feels the shadow of the nearby oak. She turns around and stares at Noah, hateful.

 _No,_ she thinks, _his name is Abel. Abel is this growth of evil. Noah is the boy I loved._

"I told you, I don't want to talk to you anymore." She tries to yell the words but they come out raspy.

"You have to let that feeling die," Noah says.

Noah.

"I wish.”

"You can't feel that way anymore."

"Whatever," she mutters.

He stands very close to her, as if sharing a secret. Blood paints his lips and mouth. "So just kill them," he says. "Kill them and come on. You'll be free."

"No."

He jabs a finger into her shoulder. _That should hurt_ , part of her thinks. _I was shot there._ "You keep poking the past like it’s a dead insect. It doesn't fix anything. It doesn't make you right."

"I can't do nothing."

"Let it die," he says. "Maybe you should die, too. Or disappear. Have you thought about that?"

Anger boils up fast, like water bursting from a geyser. She blinks and she is on the ground, straddling his waist and punching until the blood on his face warms her knuckles.

He laughs. She screams her throat raw until she finds the words again. _Get out! Get out of here! I killed you! I'll kill everyone who looks at me like you—!_

His jaw dislocates in a tight snap. She watches him die, again —

She jolts upward. Her throat feels torn up and her eyes feel heavy like she'd been crying. Hands are on her shoulders. Someone straddles her lap and in a flurry of panic she throws another punch —

Only for it to be caught in a cool, smooth palm.  
  
"Emma! You’re alright. It was just a dream. You were dreaming."  
  
Connor's voice shakes off the last bit of dreamy adrenaline. Her eyes unblur and she sees her fist was inches away from his nose. _God._ She lingers there for a moment, mind shaken blank like an etch-a-sketch. She almost hit Connor.

It wouldn’t have phased him an inch but...

“It’s okay,” he says. “Everything is fine.”

She leans into his warmth, ashamed but not quite sure where else to go, and he squeezes her tightly, whispering against her ear.

"I'm so sorry," he says, as if he had been the one to nearly clock her lights out. His hand rubs gentle circles in her back. "I didn't want to wake you up but you had started...yelling...and I thought it would be prudent to wake you..."

She nods. Prudent. Yes.

His voice bottoms out. “You didn't want to wake up.”

She bunches up his sleep shirt in her fist.

"I have to get ready for work," she mumbles.

"It’s 3 a.m."

Her shoulders slump.

She does not sleep. She makes a game of keeping as still as possible to try and trick Connor into thinking that she does. She is certain that Connor, cool as stone against her back, is not convinced. Something in his hands gives him away. The way his fingers twitch just so, laid flat in front of her face. His arms hold her tight, as if she might fly away in the night.

Then the morning comes around, anyway.

“I have to go,” he whispers into her ear.

“It’s alright,” she says, and she tries to make it true. “Sun’s up.”

He gets up and gets ready and she watches him from the bed — him and all his sleek efficiency, him and all the ways he _thinks_ he’s hiding the glances he throws her way. She lies there until she smells decaf coffee brewing in the pot and until he comes to kiss her before he leaves.

She lies there until Ryker peeks into her doorway.

“I’m good,” she says.

And then she lies there some more.

* * *

 

The tension snaps like electricity in the air. Connor leans forward in his chair at Markus' long table, staring down the man who just walked into the room. Late.

[NAME: JASON GRAFF // ADVISER EMERITUS, HUMANIZATION, CYBERLIFE  
BORN: 09/13/1982  
CRIMINAL RECORD: NONE]

Jason is perfectly cordial as he enters the main meeting hall of the Speaker's House, greeting everyone with a raised hand. His smile is well-practiced and his eyes are a watery brown, deep set in cheerful wrinkles, yet there is a sharpness to him that puts Connor on the edge of his seat.

"Apologies," Jason says, smooth and rumbling like a well-run engine. "Apparently a terrorist attack makes getting through security that much more of a pain."  
  
"Unfortunately, that is by design, Mr. Graff," Connor says, voice flat.

Jason turns his gaze fully upon Connor. His smile grows. "So it is." He leans forward on a black lacquered cane with a shaking hand wrapped around a dragon holding an agate orb in its mouth.

 _That's a bit on the nose_ , comes the voice of Hank in Connor’s head. He should not assume motive, he reminds himself. He clears his cache. He cannot correctly determine anything if he is busy pre-determining non-outcomes.

_You and that human woman you're always with._

"Please take a seat, Mr. Graff." Connor's voice is even, but his jaw is tense. "So we can finally get started."

Connor sweeps his gaze across the gathered dignitaries.

The mayor of Detroit is here with her small delegation of secretaries, same as the Michigan governor, the Speaker of Michigan’s house of representatives and Michigan's senate majority leader. Some White House operative flew in early this morning along with an aide from the national congressional committee assigned to handle "the android question."

Someone from the FBI sits silent as a shadow at the end of the table, eyeing everyone coldly. A representative from the UN sits next to him. Captain Fowler crosses his arms across his large chest and looks the least like he wants to be here in a meeting when work could be done. Valerie from the Detroit Volunteer Corps stares into her coffee. Everyone’s press corps delegation, including Simon, is handling questions outside.

And Markus, Josh and Connor are stuck in here, with North lingering in the meeting room next door. Sam sits with the other aides in the room, off to the side, silent.

They have to look like they are doing things appropriately. To uphold the image that they can solve a problem that they somehow hadn't anticipated before now. That they can react better than humans to prove their humanity. He tries not to consider the logical gaps present in that line of thinking, just as he tries to forget how utterly uninterested everyone in the room was in the issue until Jason walked in.

Jason takes his time striding toward his chair directly across from Connor. He sits in it with a loud sigh, propping his cane up against the table. _Thunk._ "So." He settles his hands on the table. “This is a mess."

“You figure that, huh,” Valerie comments from down the table, thick with derision.

“Can I get a drink, please?” Jason asks, as if he didn’t even hear her. “A sparkling water, if it’s available.”

His request prompts a strange series of exchanges and odd looks until Josh decides to take his leave to obtain the water. The optics of that aren’t lost on Connor, who narrows his eyes until Jason looks his way. The man smirks before he fishes a tablet from his old-fashioned waistcoat — a bit warm for this weather, no less — and slides it toward Connor.

“I don’t know what the rest of _you_ have,” Jason says, glancing to everyone in the room. “But that might interest you.”

Connor stares at the older man for a moment longer before flicking his eyes to the tablet. A memo.

[ _Jason-_

_I don't know why you want this assignment so ferociously, but like I said, it's yours. You've been right most of the time that I've known you, so I'll figure you're still right. Even if I don't like it._

_This could be an opportunity for us. Don't squander it._

_-T_ ]

“A memo,” Connor says. He flattens his voice until the anger simmering between his biocomponents is under his control.

“You can still confirm veracity, can't you?”

Connor doesn't grace that with a response. The IP address checks out across the various Cyberlife VPNs he still kept tabs on. The send codes are legitimate. Thomas Summerall. Cyberlife CEO.

“Cyberlife sees the terrorist attack as an opportunity,” Connor announces to the table. That prompts a chorus of mutterings throughout the group. “They don't want any action taken whatsoever.”

Jason smiles. His eyes glint with approval. Connor looks away.

“ _What?_ ” Valerie hisses at Jason. “Have you lost your mind?”

The Detroit mayor, Leticia Brown, leans forward. “That's a pretty bold statement, Connor. They live in this city just like any of us.”

Jason snorts out a single, hoarse laugh. “I know you think you have to be careful around me, Ms. Brown, but I'm not the one that signs your Cyberlife checks.” Jason turns toward Markus, congenial tone utterly unfazed even as the mayor pales in her seat.

“Why would you open with that?” Markus asks, voice cracking with mild confusion.

“What do _you_ want, Markus?” Jason asks. “After this Lyssa makes her demands?”

Markus sighs. “Peace. Respect. Understanding.” Those words are on endless repetition, and even Markus is beginning to feel frustrated by that. “Everyone expects us to go in guns blazing. You see how that worked last time someone tried that on a group of androids.”

“You all didn’t threaten everybody to leave the city,” Fowler grunts, though not without sympathy. “It woulda been different if you had, you can believe that.”

 _Maybe you can be better_ , Hank said once. _Maybe you can teach us how it is done._

_We'd love to, Hank, if anyone would take us seriously._

Jason gestures assent with his hand. “Connor’s analysis is correct. Cyberlife doesn’t really want to help. They don’t want me to tell you that, but that’s the truth of the matter. They want to bring you all back under heel again. If they can’t do that, they’re going to jack up the prices on everything they offer your people — and they’ll feel justified, thanks to instability provided by the recent act of terrorism.”

Silence descends. Treaties have collapsed from lesser provocations. Connor knows that. He spent days studying historic human peace conferences.

He thinks of Chase in repair. He thinks of Ryker’s broken leg. He thinks of Emma waking from a nightmare. He thinks of his own repairs, how he almost died of thirium loss last year because of the actions of one mad man. Their lives depend on access to those parts — so much so that in decades past, war would be a legitimate response to this crush on resources.

And that is what Jason is doing: revealing the tight spot the androids are in. Asking if they want to stick to their principles.

Josh returns with a can of seltzer and a cup of ice, breaking the silence. Jason thanks him, at least. People didn’t used to do that.

“Won’t that look bad for Cyberlife?” Valerie asks. “The DVC can turn up the heat in the media and make the company look like they’re dragging their feet.”

“Unless The Untold continue to attack. And Markus keeps pressing for peace.” Jason opens his soda can with a pop and begins pouring. “Takes a specific kind to want to work in a warzone where one side isn’t fighting back.”

The fizz snaps over ice. Valerie watches with a cold fury. “Because more violence is definitely the answer here,” she intones.

“You do need to get this under control,” one of the Congressional aides says to Valerie. Her tone is contrite; she works directly with Valerie often. “For optics, if nothing else.”

“It's not even our fault!” Josh exclaims, unable to keep his frustration at bay. “And we're the ones who pay for this?”

“That’s how it goes,” Markus’ brow furrows into a sharp cliff. “Humans have a hard enough time separating their own. They’ll have a worse time separating different factions of androids — especially if Cyberlife’s media machine kicks in.” His dichromatic eyes pinpoint Jason as he tents his fingers on the table in front of him. “And...one could argue that it might be our fault.”

Connor closes his eyes for a moment, reliving last evening’s back-and-forth. Markus was ready to shoulder all the blame for not reaching out and finding these groups when perhaps there was little blame to be had. “Discussing fault doesn’t help us now, unfortunately,” he says softly.

Markus frowns, but says nothing else.

“Either way, they certainly won’t try to send another android to fix the problem,” Jason says, jovial as ever. It requires every bit of Connor's control to avoid visibly tensing up.

If anyone here should continue to shoulder blame, Connor would put himself on the top of the list.

“Someone is going to put the hammer down on you if you don’t get this under control,” Jason continues. “Be it Cyberlife or the government. Maybe both. I’m sure you’ve been reading the stories about how...closely aligned they’ve been of late.”

Recent headlines once again began to hint at conspiracy at the highest levels of government, though most investigations so far were based entirely on anonymous sourcing. The public doesn’t listen anymore; they’ve been hearing the same tales since the election of President Warren and they still voted for her, presumably. But Connor doesn’t miss the way the White House aide clenches his tablet pen a little harder.

“That’s old crap. An old media game,” the aide says. “I don’t see how it’s relevant to _either_ of us.”

“Of course not.” Jason raises an eyebrow. “You don’t live here so you don’t really care if the military storms in, guns blazing. It’s not really _your_ problem if the first enemy engagement on American soil in nearly 100 years is in Detroit.”

<Whose side is he on?> Markus sends to Connor. <I feel like I’m watching a chess game with more than two players.>

<He doesn’t feel beholden to Cyberlife,> Connor realizes. <So why did he demand the job?>

“We have a responsibility to defend our people and that includes the people in Detroit,” the aide says, as if reading from a statement.

Josh narrows his eyes. “But not the androids.”

Markus raises his hands as the aide opens his mouth. “We’re talking in circles again. We’re here to discuss how to handle this _peacefully_ and effectively. If you just want to stir the pot,” he says, directing a pointed stare to Jason and the White House rep before glancing at everyone in the room in turn, “then keep it to yourself.”

Jason opens his arms wide. “Then let us negotiate.”

Connor sits up ramrod straight. “What are you looking for?”

“Cyberlife wants guaranteed income. They’ll even accept it from New Jericho if you can convince them it’s better in the long-term than the short-term riches they can amass from the chaos.” Jason casually pours some powdery substance into his drink from what looks like a flavor packet. Scans reveal it is some vitamin powder mixed with painkillers. A fairly common blend, these days, but Connor stores it for notation. “I can get you resources and access to whatever you may need on our end and a promise that I’ll do what I can to help you get ahead of Cyberlife’s media response.”

“Generous,” Markus comments.

Connor’s fingers weave together on the desk, squeezing tightly. “And what do _you_ want?”

Jason smiles. Connor feels the metal of a bear trap snap shut around his middle. “Merely a personal matter that I would like to discuss with you later. I promise it has little to do with the esteemed group gathered here. The insights of Cyberlife’s last living RK800 model are...invaluable to me. As a purveyor and scholar of human-android relationship building.”

Talks go round and round, circling in and out as they have for the past 24 hours. Who has final jurisdiction — the U.S. or the androids? Who gets to decide Lyssa’s final fate? For now, the ball is still in play, Hank would say, but it is hovering in the air uselessly. No one could ever agree on who gets to own what. Androids own property and pay taxes. They pay rent. They buy things. They are U.S. citizens in everything but name -- and the rights provided to those called as such.

And yet they have needs that humans do not have, just as humans have needs androids do not share. The bureaucratic mess of introducing a mass of newly identified people into the spinning cogs of daily government life was one that had barely even been breached. And now...all of _this._

The White House, Congress and the FBI announce they are leaving it to Michigan to handle, partly due to the UN announcing they are keeping “a close eye on the situation.” Michigan’s governor says they’ve agreed to let Detroit have jurisdiction, who has allowed New Jericho to handle it with their assistance as well as that of Cyberlife. A trickling down of ownership until it lands right back in the hands of the androids.

Markus ends the meeting and immediately huddles with Simon, who emerges from the sea of voices just outside the house. Together, they will fashion a statement meant for humans and The Untold alike — that Jericho wants conciliation, not fear. That Jericho will open its offices to Lyssa for discussions, and that she will not be harmed. That Jericho believes in the power of human and android friendship, as seen through the efforts of the DVC, and that won’t change under duress.

But Connor isn’t thinking about that. He watches Jason enter a private meeting room and tightens his fingers around the arms of his chair until he can hear his thirium pump rattling in his audio processors. He watches until North lays a careful hand on his shoulder and Sam moves to stand by him. Two stalwart shadows.

He adjusts his tie and strides toward Jason without a word.

* * *

 

“Do they know?” Jason asks. He nods toward Sam and North. They sit in the chairs beside Connor like the striking sculptures one would find in a church. Beautiful and foreboding in how little they allow.

Connor does not sit. He stands behind his chair as if it can give him the distance he needs to do his job. “You’re going to have to be more specific.”

Jason sighs and rolls his neck. He looks out the window that makes up the main wall in this room, into the gardens of the Speaker’s estate. Once, this room was a workshop. It still sort of functions like that, but with less color or joy.

“Alright, I’ll play by your rules.” Jason’s voice is deeper, more gruff, like he’s taken off the first layer of a costume. He loosens his tie slightly before he meets Connor’s gaze. “I want to meet Emmaline Ibori.”

North uncannily maintains her composure, not moving an inch. Sam leans forward, her shoulders taught. Connor’s cheek twitches.

“Why do you think we have any connections to her?” North asks sharply. She would not allow anyone to so boldly excavate one of the weaknesses of her cohort — though he hated considering anything about Emma a _weakness._

Jason’s stare turns withering. “Because I do my homework, Ms. North. I’ve been curious about the prototype who became one of the voices of the androids. What kind of person he is.”

Connor sees white for a moment. “You’ve been spying on me.”

“Of course I have. That’s what we do at this level of business, Connor. And others probably would too if your aides weren’t so damn good at their jobs.”

Connor glances to Sam’s back. She remains still and stony, gazing just over Jason’s shoulder.

Connor settles in his chair. Something deeply cold works through his biocomponents — a wrongness like a virus, threatening solvency of his code. Jason is right. This is what people do to get by in this business. It’s innocuous. A way to get a leg up. Legal until you get caught. What does Jason want so badly he would be willing to show this many cards?

Connor thought he had been keeping her _safe._

“I haven’t told anyone else,” Jason says, as if offended by the notion. “I think most people would assume it impossible for you to feel anything but congenial distance, Mr. Anderson. You put on a good show.”

Connor feels something crack inside of him. Icicles snapping off a roof.

Sam suddenly leans back in her chair. “What tipped you off?”

“Now, I get some secrets to myself, don’t I?”

“Not when you call me on a personal line asking about—” Connor snaps his mouth shut. The love of his life, yes, that was what he was about to say, but he will not give Jason the pleasure of hearing it out in the open like this, coaxed out like a seal from a frozen lake. “—Emma Ibori.”

“He called you direct?” Sam asks, voice low.

“Just tell us what you want,” North snaps, patience evaporated. “Why Emma? Other than to make a point of how well-informed you are?”

The man has the gall to smile. “Maybe I enjoy that, Ms. North. Not much in the way for entertainment anymore once you get to my age.” His smile widens, but he wisely continues without giving North a chance to respond. “I read the Free Press article. So did everyone else in the city that matters. I want to talk to her before the rest of the media gets its hands on her.”

Connor reminds himself to reactivate his breathing protocol. “Is Cyberlife angry about that too?”

“No,” Jason says curiously. “It’s in the past. It’s not like people are _buying_ androids anymore.”

Connor’s eye twitches. It’s in the past for some, maybe.

Jason sips his drink, the ice long melted, the bubbles long flat. “Make no mistake, I _am_ getting old.” His eyes sharpen over the edge of his glass before he sets it down with a heavy clink. “I’m thinking about things like legacy. Aging. The nonsense things humans have to worry about. And I open my newspaper and I see this story about a young woman who lives with cybernetic implants. All throughout her body. The kind of work that would instantly land you in jail, now. And the only people who fully understand the work that went into her...creation...are dead.” He gestures outward with one hand. Connor sees the imprint of his other, veiny palm through the dregs of his drink. “Well, I’m a scientist at heart. I’m curious. What kind of future awaits a woman like that? What does it mean for the rest of us? What will it _reveal_?”

Connor is very glad that Jason’s glass is far across the table from him. In an instant, he runs through a simulation of picking it up and smashing it over Jason’s salt-and-pepper hair, letting the glass shards cut his fragile human skin. His hands tense into fists on the table. He’d already calculated the man’s physical weak points countless times. He cannot afford to act on them.

He can't afford for Cyberlife to send someone more willing to toe the company line. Jason is a livewire, but he’s a weirdly amenable one.

“Emma isn’t your _experiment,”_ Connor says, nearly through his teeth.

Jason looks at him strangely for a moment. His mouth quirks, as if he almost slipped and said ‘zig’ instead of the intended ‘zag.’

“You’re right,” he finally says. “But you don’t wonder what will happen to the woman you love? How long she’ll live?”

North rises to her feet. “Don’t.”

Jason raises an eyebrow but he adjusts his tie and fixes his collar as he stands, leaning hard against the table. His dragon cane’s black eyes glint in the light of the mid-afternoon sun. “Either way, I don’t really think you get to choose what she does. I came to you as a courtesy out of respect for your...relationship. I figured this way you might have reason not to kill me on sight. The RK800 always were scarily efficient that way.”

_Can fear have a physical component? Can it grow like vines and choke you even when you don’t need to breathe? Is this what nightmares are like, Emma? A strange place you can’t escape?_

Jason comes around the table to shake Connor’s hand. Connor doesn’t take it.

“You’re good at this, you know,” Jason whispers, almost concerned. “But your poker face would be better without the LED.”

Connor’s eyes burn as the man leaves him, his cane tapping out a careful rhythm against the wood floor.

He stands still, watching out the window into the garden. A hummingbird flirts with a bright red feeder. The roses are the perfect kind of pink, Emma told him last time she visited him here — the round kind that feels warm. He stands there, thinking of her voice describing the feeling of a rose, until Markus and Simon suddenly enter his peripherals. North must have already told them everything. They are likely constantly connected, never truly apart through android uplink—

No, no. Don’t think about it.

He turns to watch Markus and Simon both, speaking animatedly even as they watch Connor expectantly.

“Why don’t we beat him to the punch?” Simon offers up.

“We have a good story here,” Markus agrees, though Connor doesn’t understand what, exactly, he is referring to.

“A bit on the nose, don’t you think? Playing into stereotypes?” North, the devil’s advocate.

“Connor wasn’t built to be a companion type,” Simon says gently, which prompts Connor out of his reverie in an instant. “It’s very real. Genuine.”

“What?”

Markus places a hand on Connor’s shoulder. “You and Emma. You might be our way out of this.”

* * *

 

Sam is waiting for him by the car. She approaches, mouth pinned into a tight line. “Did you hear—”

“Yes,” he says darkly. “I am ready to go home.”

_You and Emma, story of the century. You and Emma, salvation to all our woes. All you have to do invite everyone, everywhere into the lives you’ve carefully built together. Surely then we will garner all the goodwill of the world and stay a step ahead of Cyberlife and Lyssa while not openly decrying either party. Perfect._

[ _You are being disingenuous. That is not how they presented it to you. They respected your boundaries and you said you would consider it and bring it to her. You are the one that fully expects her to reject this plan on its face and rather pointedly did not tell them that._ ]

Sam opens the car door for him in an unusual symbol of deference. He takes a moment to collect himself. He should not so obviously be in distress. He looks upon Sam and sighs.

“I apologize for my behavior,” he says. “It is not your fault.”

She tilts her head slightly. “It isn’t yours, either.” Her eyes narrow. “I’ll figure out everything I can about him.”

He can’t help but smirk. “I almost feel sorry for him.”

“He’ll regret it,” she says simply, gesturing Connor inside the car. His smirk softens into the closest thing to a smile he’s had since he left Emma’s house this morning.

“Thank you, Sam.”

She looks away, as if they’d both said too much. “Don’t thank me yet. I have a bad feeling about this.”

* * *

 

Ryker settles, ever so carefully, on the large, brown sectional that takes up most of Emma’s living room. They sit next to a sleeping Chase and watch with fascination and relief in equal measure as Emma actually sleeps, too. Not the carefully constructed facsimile of sleeping she sometimes pulls or the classic “resting with her eyes closed” pose that leaves her body taut. Her breaths are deep and even and her mouth is popped slightly open, shiny with spit. It is disgusting; it is entirely Emma.

All it took was turning on some old kid’s cartoon and burying her in androids.

Chase lies on his back. Messi is curled into his side, her back against the pillow. Emma is sprawled atop them, one hand on Messi’s shoulder and another on Chase’s, her head tucked under Chase’s chin. Chase rests his hand on her hair. His LED flashes the soft blue indicating rest mode.

Ryker lays a careful, uncertain hand on Emma’s back. They sync their breathing protocol to hers, as if it could ensure they could both go to the same peaceful place.

_I’m good._

She had emerged from her room this morning holding a blanket Ryker had never seen before — fleecy and faded and splotched with animal shapes. _I found this. You should have it, it’s soft._

_...are you cleaning out your closet?_

_Shit piles up fast, Blondie, I dunno,_ she had said, evasive. Her eyes were puffy and dark. _This is old. Guess I forgot to give it away._

She carefully wrapped it around their shoulders. The morning had been brisk for a Michigan summer. They had to bend down slightly for her to reach around them; sometimes Ryker forgot they were nearly a foot taller than her — a consequence of spending much of their time at hip level. The blanket smelled like an old linen closet — a clean musk that lingered through years — and their eyes caught on what looked like an red acrylic paint stain. It struck them then that this must have been hers as a child. The kind of thing she usually held onto, even between a hundred moves.

Before Ryker could ask what was going on, Emma swept out the door to work, tool bag hanging heavily against her thinning frame.

Ryker spent the day transferring mid-summer plants into the garden in Emma’s backyard, ignoring the pathetic, sinking feeling near their thirium pump.

( _What can be done about someone like Lyssa? Someone who threatens everyone at every turn?_ )

[ _She’s not a threat to you. She understands in a way that no one else does, that no one else can...the fear that festers inside you like rot. The rest of them, they all change and grow and you’re still here, a moldy seed that will never sprout_.]

Now, Ryker places the blanket Emma tried to give away this morning over her back and smooths it out with their palms. She sleeps hot, and they can still feel her warmth through the old fabric. For a moment, they linger here and think of nothing else. The beauty of the present is that there _is_ nothing else.

But then Connor returns.

He enters with unnatural speed but then freezes in the small, plastic-tiled foyer. His eyes lock on Emma’s back. He closes the door behind him softly. And in these fleeting moments, Ryker feels frustration and loathing burn through them white hot. The brilliant, perfect RK800 looks lost, scrabbling for purchase as he watches Emma sleep. He is desperate for acceptance and they hate that it is Emma of all people who has given it to him.

“Come to take her away?” they ask. They mean it as a joke, but something about Connor sucks the humor out of them. The cartoon mumbles quietly in the background — a strange relief from endless reporting on the attack, lists of safety measures and public transit security adjustments.

“...no,” Connor says. He takes off his blazer and puts it on the coat rack. He loosens his tie and runs his hands through his hair and moves to sit in the armchair, leaning over his knees. His eyes linger on the sleeping pile of beings as he moves, which Ryker would find impressive if it wasn’t so annoyingly, perfectly on brand.

Something is really bothering him.

Ryker keeps their hand on Emma. Perhaps in defiance. Still. “She came home from work early,” Ryker admits, because few other people in the world would understand exactly why something like that would thrust Ryker and Chase into a panic. And Ryker gets the reaction they want. Connor sits up and stares hard at her sleeping face, as if he could read her thoughts.

“Sick?” he asks.

“No fever. No...nothing. She just...she’s not all there,” Ryker says, realizing it as they say it. The pathetic feeling in their chest turns sharp and freezing, expanding like ice across a lake. Emma won’t tell them what the problem is so Ryker can do nothing except stand by and hope to rA9 that she isn’t quietly dying right beneath their palm.

(Why won’t she talk to me? Why won’t she _listen to me?_ I knew this would happen, _I knew —_ )

“You shouldn’t have let her publish her story whenever she wanted,” Ryker says before they can stop themselves. “I tried to stop her. She wouldn’t hear of it.”

Connor watches them, expression unreadable. “I tried, too.”

“Well, why is this happening?” _Why is she suffering in silence? How can she still be right here next to me when she’s left me behind for a newer model?_

“I don’t know, Ryker.”

“Why not? You’re the only one she’s real around anymore,” they snap, eyes hot, and it is then they realize they’ve said something they cannot take back. “And now Lyssa, and now…”

They can’t do _anything._

“Are you going to solve it or not?” Ryker asks. They glare. The tears fall in warm streaks down their face and they refuse to clarify further. Solve it all, deviant hunter. Fix it. Or were you only ever designed to _break?_

Connor is focused entirely on Emma’s face. But then, suddenly, he does turn his gaze on Ryker, and it burns so hot that Ryker is startled from their own reveries.

“It’s going to get worse,” Connor says. He says it so flatly that it must be true.

“How could it get worse?” Ryker asks.

“Cyberlife.”

Ryker’s hand on Emma’s back seizes. “What do they want?”

Connor looks pointedly at Emma.

 _No._ **_No._ **

“Why? What could they _possibly—_ ”

“I need your help,” Connor says, desperate. “I tried everything to keep her out of this.”

( _but you failed but you failed but you failed bUT YOU FAILED_ )

“What could I possibly do to help _you?_ ” The perfect, brilliant, handsome RK800?

But then they see, so starkly, the immense pain flickering in Connor’s barely-there frown. “She listens to you,” he says quietly. “You have to tell her...to say no to the thing I am going to suggest to her.”

That’s when Ryker wonders if they, too, had fallen asleep and tripped into something akin to a human nightmare.

Because all they can do is _laugh._

It mixes with their tears and their anger in hysterical giggles and they wonder briefly if something in them has broken even farther.

“I don’t know how you came to that conclusion, detective,” they say, smile shattered, “but you’re so very wrong.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "i hate you, you asshole," i say lovingly as I write the asshole that says mean things to my characters.  
> "i love intrigue," i say as i cry over forgetting every single nation-building entity that exists some five times over.  
> typical!!!
> 
> thanks as ever to @masqvia for inspiring the bit about the legal status of androids (tl;dr - it's nonsense, folks!) and to @popsicletheduck for yelling with me about THE PARALLELS and to @caitlynmellark for inspiring the chase and emma CUTENESS.
> 
> only gonna get wilder from here folks
> 
> Join us in the ['a garden in detroit' discord](https://discord.gg/TcDeeJP)!!!!


	4. a vine of ivy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Between the seams that line your living room  
> A vine of ivy's pushing her way through  
> And as she creeps along, she sinks her roots  
> Into the cracks, and pulls 'em back until the structure's coming loose..." -Grow, The Oh Hellos

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 5 years late with a Starbucks. At least I get to add a new character to the tag list...

Emma is not quite sure what's going on.

Waking up midday always feels like pulling out of a thick pool, anyway, but then Connor kneels down in front of her and takes her hands like a knight ready to beg his lady for a favor, and Chase leans forward ever so slightly as if considering a take down move against a model far superior in fighting tactics compared to him, and the image makes something crack in her so loudly that suddenly she’s laughing.

Her words still don’t feel real, and so she, without thinking, says: “I accept.”

“What?”

“Your proposal.”

Nobody laughs. She supposes this isn’t a very kind thing to joke about, though what else can she joke about anymore except sure things? Connor looks at her with such shock that she feels cold eels slither through her guts. Maybe she really ought to sort out her feelings on the marriage thing. She has no real reason to desire marriage other than that is what her parents had done. She hasn’t even asked him if he is interested in that sort of thing. Maybe he really had no idea what she had been referring to.

“I guess the living room would be a bad place for that,” she says, throat closing. Ryker places their head in their hands for a moment, which makes her smile brokenly until Connor begins explaining the situation.

Cyberlife has come knocking. The government is breathing down the androids’ necks to get this terrorism problem solved, which the androids will be hard-pressed to do without resources from Cyberlife. And Emma is somehow the currency in play.

Some old man wants to meet with her. She wishes she was surprised.

“You can say no,” Ryker says. They sit next to her, their arms wrapped tightly around their middle. Chase’s grip around her shoulder tightens, sensing her growing unease.

Connor searches her face. “Think about your health.”

“Yes,” she says slowly, “because watching you all die of thirium loss will be really good for that.”

“He’s probably conning us,” Ryker says. Their voice is bitter; she doesn’t like the sound of it.

“What could he do to me?” Emma tries to gesture with her hands, but Connor has her in the kind of vice grip he doesn’t tend to notice. “He’s not God or the police.”

(Though Cyberlife is God and the Devil both; “What I giveth I may taketh away,” she thinks bitterly. The company built her family. She feels like the first human in history to ever think such a thing.)

“We don’t know,” Connor says.

She huffs through her nose. “That’s the problem?”

“Yes.”

Frustration builds suddenly. “You’re never gonna know it all.” She glances at Ryker’s leg, the one they don’t talk about. They notice her doing so and that connection snaps like a livewire between them. She presses on, afraid of the silence. “If I do this, then I can at least give you time to figure out his game.”

“See?” Ryker says, furious, though not to her, she realizes late.

“New Jericho already has a plan to...figure out his game,” Connor says.

“Are you clenching your jaw?” she asks softly.

“I…” He purses his lips though his cheeks loosen, if only for a moment. “They want you to do a media tour. Highlighting our relationship.”

She's too stunned to say anything. Ryker makes up for the dead air. “What?” they snap.

“They believe that if we beat Cyberlife to presenting a united front...and make it clear that human and android relationships can happen in a healthy way...that we can curry favor with the public and, in the long run, potentially protect us all from being...otherwise incapacitated.”

By Cyberlife. Disappeared.

God, what movie was she living in now?

“They want a Markus 2.0,” Chase says, miserable.

She leans into Chase a moment because he's right. They want people to love her. To buy in, like during Markus’ original rallies, to the idea that love truly can conquer all boundaries. All she has to do is give up her own.

“I wouldn’t call the story of how we got together...healthy,” she says.

Connor doesn’t smile, but a little bit of light enters his eyes, which is enough.

“I was already going to do a media tour anyway,” she adds, because she isn't sure what else to say. She looks to Ryker, who watches Connor with the kind of icy vitriol they usually reserved for the kinds of people who stepped on wild flowers. “What are you so mad about?”

“Do you think it'll work?” Ryker asks Connor. “Tell the truth.”

Connor's brows shoot to the top of his head. His mouth pops open. He didn't expect that, apparently...and a darkness enters his eyes that signals it may have been a betrayal. “It...has its wisdom. And as Emma said, she is likely to expect media attention anyway.” Suddenly, he switches gears, turning his smoldering gaze firmly upon her. “Aren't you mad? You are under no obligation to do this.”

“Yeah,” she says, and she feels the old beast there waiting just beneath her heart. She knows Connor too well. Of course he would do this. Her mouth is dry but she, like Ryker, presses on. “I'm mad because you _want_ me to be mad.” She tugs her hands out of his grip and places them carefully on the sides of his face. “Why?”

He closes his eyes at the touch like a parched man at a waterfall. Too much. “Please. We have no way of knowing--”

She sighs so angrily he cuts himself off.

“Why are you doing this? Why are you second guessing?” She gently turns his head so he is forced to look her in the eye. “It's smart, Con. It sucks ass, but it's smart.”

When he finally opens his eyes, she spots an emptiness within that sends her heart racing with panic. “Is it what you want?” His voice is impossibly quiet.

She glances to Ryker. They settle in their seat, resigned. Chase, too, observes quietly as he always does, but with an anger that shimmers just beneath his skin. What is she supposed to do? Let the assholes who want to hurt them win? Who does this Jason think he is? Who does Cyberlife think _she_ is?

“I'll pay the price to protect you. Always,” she says. She injects as much steel into her voice as she can. “If Jason wants to bet the house on me, he's gonna have to live with disappointment.”

She holds Connor's face in her hands as he silently turns and presses his forehead into her palm.

* * *

Emma has Connor's hand in a vice grip as their car drives through a verdant wood in the outskirts of Detroit. The tree limbs are too close. The car is too warm. Her heart beats so fast she wonders if she’ll die.

Connor pulls her hand against his chest so that the back of her palm rests just over where his thirium pump beats. "Breathe."

"I am."

"You're not."

She takes a very deep, loud breath to prove him wrong, and she gets a little dizzy, which makes her laugh. She _is_ being a little ridiculous. She knows that.

“You'll have Cyberlife's top of the line model to serve your every need," Connor says, looking primly ahead.

“Good thing. He might have to rebroker the peace with Cyberlife. Or bury a man.”

Connor smiles at her and she smiles back just as the car pulls up to the house.

The manor is beautiful and old, a far cry from the McMansion Emma expected to find. Gabled rooftops and birch trees surround a circle dive, giving the large house a bizarre sense of privacy. Some of the windows remind her of an old church, thin and rectangular and boxed together. One large chimney extends from the original part of the house -- likely from the 1920s, if her guess was right. A place like this could have been owned by the original Detroit car barons.

"Have you ever fixed a place like this?" Connor asks, catching her stare.

"No." She shoves her hands into her jeans. If Jason wanted to meet her, he would get her as she is, no more or less. "Rich people don't really ask after people like me."

“Present company excluded.”

“For some reason.”

She follows Connor to the wooden, round-top door. Connor karangs the heavy metal knocker, shaped like a dragon, three times.

Emma scoffs at this display. “For real?”

“It does feel like a prop you’d find in a movie, doesn’t it?”

No one comes to greet them.

[!!!>>>SCAN IN PROCESS]

She gasps and nearly jumps backwards at the blood red text that blocks nearly her entire vision. Stupidly, she waves a hand in front of her eyes as if to wipe it away.

“Just a security scan,” Connor says. His hand settles on her lower back, cool and protective. “Focus on the words for a moment and they’ll go away.”

She wonders, for a moment, if this is purposeful -- if Jason would somehow know she would react like this and it would throw her off. But that is how paranoid detectives think, and they do not need another one of those in this duo.

"Welcome, Connor Anderson and Emmaline Ibori,” the door chimes in response. The lock clicks and the door swings open, sending Emma’s hair flying from her face as a cool breeze meets them. The revealed foyer is dark and wooded with old-fashioned wall paneling, and it opens up to a staircase with an ornate bannister carved in the shape of vines. Sunlight spills in long pools from a pair of french doors at the back of the main hallway.

“Hello?” she calls out.

An intercom clicks on. “Go down the hallway and through the doors,” an old man says, gruff and tired.

Emma glances to Connor.

“He doesn’t sound happy,” he says quietly.

Her eyes struggle to adjust to the dark parlor. The doors in the back act like suncatchers for the mid-afternoon light. The air smells heavily of lemon polish. Her wetware brain whirs to life as her heartbeat takes off: [???ARMOIRE??? DARK CHERRY WOOD???] Her palms begin to sweat. What can this man do to her here, with Connor beside her? Nothing. Nothing at all. She is in his domain, following his rules, sure, but he isn’t a predator. He’s an old dragon past his prime.

( _And you are a hobbled knight without a sword--_ )

She pushes toward the set of French doors, ornamented with carvings of roses (a twinge in her heart at how badly she wished she had that sense of artistry in her hands anymore), and shoves her way through. The door hinge squeaks loudly in protestation. She stumbles to a stop as Connor’s hand suddenly slips around her waist, pulling her against his side.

The light feels green and damp in this secret garden. Large, rounded hedges guard the stepping-stone pathway, which winds around a large rose bush. Stone walls covered in ivy cast the edges in cool shade.

“You okay?” she whispers.

He doesn’t answer for a moment. His LED spins red, then yellow as he finally looks down upon her. “This place reminds me of somewhere. I...was making sure you were still with me.”

She squints. More and more, this all feels calculated against them, but she steps forward anyway, unwilling to bend. She follows the stone path until it funnels into a clearing amongst the flowering bushes and trellises, where an old man sits at a small patio table for two, cane leaning up against a table, and --

An android in a white jacket turns back to stare at her.

His cold grey eyes pin her in place, set just above Machiavellian cheekbones. His brown hair is perfectly tousled with a single bang hanging over his forehead, where there is exactly three freckles--

“...Connor?” she asks suddenly, stupidly--

The android stares at her, LED spinning yellow.

“This is RK,” Jason says, turning back to greet her. He is not smiling nor does he rise. “An RK900 model. He...works for me.”

Before she can think to say anything, Connor is already standing in front of her, one arm out to keep her back. She peers around his shoulder, laying one hand against his spine. RK watches, unamused. “I didn’t know androids were still under Cyberlife’s employ,” Connor says, voice formal and cold.

“I find the work fulfilling,” says RK. Ice shoots up Emma’s spine at how similar his voice is to Connor’s, and yet how much...darker it sounds.

She can feel Connor tense just under her fingers. “What’s your given name?” Connor asks.

“RK is my chosen moniker.”

Emma speaks up. “You don’t want...something more…”

“Human?” RK’s face does not move. He watches Connor as if he lives to be a complete blank slate, unreadable and distant, until suddenly his eyes flick to Emma and she feels the air leave her lungs. “Why would I want that?”

Connor’s hands ball into fists. “What are you doing here?”

“My job.” RK’s eyes do not move from Emma. “If you are that woman’s bodyguard, you should know her stress levels are rising rapidly.”

Emma’s heart slams in her chest as Connor further tries to block RK’s eyeline. Jason waves his hand as if to regain control of the situation or perhaps erase the tension in the air. It doesn’t work. “Why don’t you two go and talk about your differences elsewhere while Emma and I chat?”

“Absolutely not,” Connor says.

“Then leave.” Jason knocks on the table. “But if you leave, the deal is off.”

“No,” Emma blurts, world beginning to spin. “No. I’m here now. We’re talking. I...I want to talk.”

Jason gestures to the chair across from him. “I’d like that.”

Connor tilts his head down toward her with the question evident on his lips One of his hands finds her free one. _Are you sure? No one will force you._

“I’m fine,” she says. She wills herself to believe it. “We’re just gonna chat.”

“RK, kindly take Connor inside,” Jason commands. The android responds instantly and with a smoothness to his movements that makes Emma’s hair stand on end. He moves like an engineer’s dream. He has none of the subtle hesitation, none the quick-but-slow decision-making that demarks a human body as it moves through space. She has the wild thought that RK may be showing off -- but his emotionless face reveals nothing. She wonders if he has any individual thoughts at all.

“I give you my word,” Jason says to Connor. “No harm will come to her. Or you.”

Connor has no time to reply. RK gently grabs his arm before he yanks Connor forward _just enough._ Emma’s stomach flips. Connor meets her gaze and doesn’t let it go. And then, the two androids -- twins, her heart screams, _twins_ \-- disappear around the hedge corner, and she can see Connor no longer.

She realizes she stopped breathing. She takes a sudden breath in and feels her eyes prick. RK. Connor. If they switched clothes, would she be able to tell the difference beyond the eye color? If RK killed Connor, would she know? _Of course I would know,_ she snaps to her own thoughts. _I will always know him in a crowd. He’s my Connor. Just like Ryker is my Ryker._

Yet her heart still pounds.

“It’s alright,” Jason says once the androids disappear. His tone softens considerably as he waves her over to the seat in front of him. “RK was not supposed to...be here.”

“What was…” She starts, but the sentence dies in her throat. “Who is he? To you?”

“He is my agent in this changing world.”

Emma crosses her arms. “ _Does_ he work for Cyberlife?”

“He works for me. Though I can understand that difference might mean little to you.”

“Why? What does that even mean?”

“Why does he work for me?” He snorts a silent laugh. “That's the big question, isn't it.” Jason clicks open a glass bottle of sparkling water, some fancy brand from Italy, and pours her a fizzing glass without asking. “He is, under a technicality, still Cyberlife's, as were all unfinished models. I...requisitioned him. To help me find intel on New Jericho and this developing mess,” he says, gesturing in a circle around the table. “I did ask him if he would rather be out in the world working for no one. He rather pointedly had no opinion on the matter.”

“Convenient.”

“Please sit,” he says once again, quieter still. “I truly am sorry he disrupted our meeting.”

His conciliatory tone rings like an offkey piano note. She feels disjointed inside. Connor leaving yanked a veil off the open sores inside her, and now she is left with this old man who she can’t read and the feeling that RK’s icy gaze somehow still lingers on her skin. But she does sit down. She is getting tired of standing. Even in this shaded garden, the air is too sticky for comfort.

He leans forward and something in his watery gaze -- something real -- forces her to look away. “How are you feeling?”

She settles back in her chair, legs wide, posture slouched. She doesn’t care if it’s disrespectful. “Not good,” she admits. “I don’t really know what you want with me.”

“I don’t want anything from you, Emma,” he says. He says it so calmly, like he’s practiced this. “I want to help you.”

“Oh, _god_ ,” she says, withering. “You and the whole damn world.”

She can feel him smile. “You’re charmingly jaded.”

“Why should I trust you with anything?” She sits up a little more and finally meets his gaze. “I don’t know who prepared you for meeting with me, but I am literally only here to protect Connor and my...friends,” she says. Family nearly slips out, but that feels too raw to share with Jason.

“I know,” he says softly. “Don’t you think someone should be protecting you, too? Helping you?” His voice is calm and kindly, and it slips under her skin. Her heart rate slows. She shouldn’t trust him. “You are a cyborg. A medical anomaly of the first order. And I was a doctor before I worked with Cyberlife.”

She plants her feet on the ground. “And? What? You want to do tests with me?”

Suddenly he is the one who can't look at her. He fishes something out of his pocket -- some brandless supplement -- and he pours it into his drink. He clears his throat. “Don't you get frustrated with the endless stimuli sorting? A wetware mesh brain is an incredible thing but also a finicky thing. Too little input and it tries to fix the gap by itself. Too much input...and the sensations have nowhere organic to overflow safely.” He looks up at her, almost sheepish, as he lays out the inside of her skull like a science project. “You're clearly exhausted. With the memories reawakening, I'm sure it has been... difficult.”

Terror and a horrible feeling of finally being _seen_ strikes her silent for a long moment. She sips at the fizzy water and winces. It tastes like stomach acid. “Why do you know so much about it?”

“I've been an entrepreneur for a long time,” he says. He turns and looks out at a garden wall covered in soft, white flowers. Her heart thrums in her chest. Her intuition goes from a ping to a long screech.

“Why are you telling me this?”

He doesn't move for a moment. “Emma, do you know what will happen if we don’t learn to understand your cybernetics?”

No. Not at all. She can’t speak well enough to say that.

“Do you have strange pains?” he asks. “Poor sleep? Do you have thoughts you feel like you shouldn’t have? Do you ever sometimes feel...not itchy, but as if at any moment you feel like you might claw out of your own skin?”

Noah’s face flashes in her memory so viscerally that she tightens her grip on the glass of putrid water. She says nothing, but her reaction signals the affirmative to Jason, who ‘hmms’ quietly.

“And the worst part is...you have no idea if it will get better or worse.”

“Yeah,” she says weakly.

“I know. I feared as much.”

“How?” She wants to scream at him. She wishes she’d never come here. She knows what is coming before he says it.

“Because,” he says. He turns to her and looks so impossibly sad that she wonders if he practiced this, too, giving her this news, delivering it so that he looks like a sad, shaved Santa Claus. “Because before I worked for Cyberlife, I worked with Genesis Biotech. I was the lead executive on Project Nazirite. And I approved every single thing that was done to you.”

She doesn’t think. She takes the water glass, and throws it at his head.

* * *

RK stands utterly still, hands clasped behind his back, looking at nothing. He waits just inside the garden door with absolutely zero interest paid to Connor, who keeps crossing and uncrossing his arms as he tries to eavesdrop on the conversation in the distance.

But Connor can't stop staring.

It’s like looking into a mirror of who he doesn’t want to be. RK is effortlessly everything Cyberlife ever tried to make Connor into. It feels like an affront. Another failure, somewhere deep inside his code.

"When were you made?" Connor tries to sound authoritative. It comes out too quiet.

RK does not even glance at him. "The RK900 model began testing the day after the RK800 model first succeeded in the field. August 2038."

"Why?"

RK finally looks at him. Of course he would. The question makes no sense, and yet he still felt prompted to ask it. "Companies must always iterate."

Connor stares. Those cold grey eyes give away exactly nothing. RK can likely see everything on his face. Another failure.

"You are bothered," RK observes.

Connor's spine tenses. "You’re not someone I ever expected to see."

"Nor I, you." RK's eyes sharpen. "It was understood that the RK800 testing phases had been... difficult. I hypothesized, upon completion of my test, that all models had failed."

Connor blinks. Feels static run up systems. "I guess you weren't wrong."

"I rarely am."

A glint of humor and haughtiness in RK's stare prompts Connor to finally understand why Hank couldn't stand him at first. But as quickly as he notices it, the slate washes clean at once. Was he once truly like this? Distant and cold, hewn from stone, unpersonable? Could he still be this way? Is that what people thought when they looked at him?

He finds himself so lost in these questions that RK must move to meet his gaze once again. RK is ever so slightly taller.

It is annoying.

"Explain your relationship with Emmaline Ibori."

"Emma," Connor corrects instantly. "What do you want to know?"

His attempt to obfuscate fails. Instead, RK leans back minutely, as if Connor had confirmed something for him. A long moment passes before RK reveals his judgment: "Strange."

"I don’t think it is.”

RK lifts an eyebrow. A perfect mockery of expression. “Don’t you?”

Connor looks away. Synapses in his chest wink out dangerously as he refocuses on the quiet voices outside. And yet RK does not let up. The water has been bloodied.

“Does her lifespan not bother you?”

Connor digs his fingers into his pockets. "I can see Cyberlife made no upgrades to our ability at subtlety."

RK's stare is heavy.

"It doesn't matter to me." Connor stares back. "I will be with her as long as I am allowed."

"Why?"

Before Connor can calculate exactly how much of RK’s statement is a joke or an echo -- whether he is jabbing at Connor’s incompetence or truly curious about something that shouldn’t interest a machine -- glass shatters somewhere in the garden. Emma starts shouting.

The two androids react in the same instant; they jolt into a synchronized run that would have made Olympic swimmers weep.

* * *

“I can’t fucking believe you.”

"Emma, sit down--"

"What the fuck is this!" she shouts, because it feels damn good to shout. It feels damn good to have someone to blame. "Your people, your Genesis _fuckheads_ , ruined my life and you think I want to sit down and have a garden tea party with you? _You absolute fuckwad!_ "

"Turn your voice down, please--"

"No! Shut up!" She looms over him and she likes the fear that enters his eyes in a cold flash. Water drips from his hair and blood leaks down his cheek from a thin cut on his temple. She likes the feeling that she could snap his bones if she wanted to, or beat him with his dragon-head cane until bruises bloomed in the shape of its snout. She's stronger than him in all the ways that matter.

The seconds pass like honey down a cold plate as Jason slowly rises, bracing himself against the garden table. The fury drowns out all other sound except the beating of her heart -- until suddenly it doesn't. She is pulled tightly against someone's chest. She remembers with the heavy finality of sledgehammer that perhaps she shouldn't enjoy something like this so much.

"Breathe," Connor says to the back of her head.

"Did you hear--" The words stumble over each other. "What he is, what he did--"

RK steps in front of her, staring down like a white void. She can see nothing in his eyes, even as the creases around his eyes tighten just so.

"Shall I remove her?" RK asks Jason.

"No!" Jason snaps, with a frustration that prompts Emma to deflate further. "Both of you stand down!"

"You first," Connor says coldly to RK.

RK observes Connor for a breathless moment before he silently turns back toward Jason, hands clasped behind his back. Emma squints at the middle space in the air.

Connor's grip loosens around her arms as he comes around to face her, back pointedly to Jason as he asks: "Are you alright?"

She doesn't know how to answer that, so she says nothing. She focuses on Jason, torn between glaring and apologizing. The outburst felt both deeply justified and so far outside her usual range of reaction that she gets lost somewhere in the middle and just stands there like an idiot.

"Get me a towel, would you?" Jason asks RK, dismissive. And for a single moment, RK does not respond to the order. He glances once again to Connor and Emma, scorching and strange. Emma wonders for a moment if he will simply tell Jason to go fuck himself -- wouldn't that be a deviancy story worth telling? -- before RK turns on his heels and exits at once, silent.

Emma watches him leave, and does not speak until he is behind the closed door. "Is...is he a..."

"A deviant?" Jason takes off his top jacket. She wonders how he was even wearing it in this weather, anyway. "No."

Her eyebrows shoot up. " _No?_ " She glances at Connor. His face is unreadable, watching Jason closely.

"The current humanization director tells me its actually impossible for him to deviate," Jason says. He's so casual about it. "He always follows orders. Never reacts emotionally. The whole trouble with the RK800 series....well." He bites his lip, as if he said too much. "I thought it would be impossible, frankly, for them to achieve it."

Emma glares. "You just can't stop fucking experimenting, can you?"

His eyes darken. He frowns deeply, as if pained. "I deserved that. I know. I deserved the glass, too. I was ready for worse."

"Why did you ask me to come here if you knew that was how I'd react?"

"Because," he says gruffly. "Emma. Because. I didn’t lie. I was a doctor before all this. I took the Hippocratic oath. I broke it. And for a long time, I wondered if I would have to live with that. Believing you likely died out there despite your parents help. I was ready for that." His expression turns flinty as RK returns with a towel. The android hands it over without a word before stepping back, hands clasped behind his back again, gazing emptily upon Emma and Connor.

"But then I found out you were alive and in Detroit," Jason continues. "I...think it is a chance I will not receive again. And...if I might say...it’s one you may not receive again, either."

Her eyes burn. "What the fuck does that mean?"

"You can no more change the fact that you are a cyborg than you can change the fact that you are an angry woman whose early years were stolen from her." He dabs at his bloody cheek for emphasis. "And there’s not many people left in the cybernetics business, these days. We have to work with what we have."

But here’s the thing, Emma thinks. Even the unchangeable things can shift. That’s the problem. Her whole life turned upside-down in the course of three months. Less than a year ago, she'd have laughed this all off, flipped him the bird and walked out. Less than a year ago, she'd still be a nothing nobody fixing houses for cheap, believing full-heartedly that she was a simple human girl who lost her parents in a tragic, freak accident.

She's still that, inside. But she also isn't, anymore.

“How did we not know that about him?” Emma asks Connor.

“He changed his name,” Connor says, and his tone indicates he just finished realizing it. “Changed everything, all his records, so no one could ever link him back to Genesis. He was ready to leave it all behind. Forget it all. Ride the coattails of success.”

Jason lifts his palm to the sky in a sort of shrug. _Found out. What can you do?_

For a fleeting moment, she considers asking him his real name. A more pressing question falls out first. "You knew my parents?"

"I did.” His gaze slides down to the table. “Their loss is...a loss for the world."

He is genuine, she realizes. He means that. 

Slowly, she sits back down. She can feel the weight of the two androids' attention. They look not upon Jason, but her, the spark of wildfire in the garden. RK watches her, unabashed, a glacier that has all the time in the world.

"So what do you want to do with me?” she asks flatly. “What do I have to do to make sure you help Jericho?”

Slowly, Jason smiles. 

“Consider this opportunity,” he says. “How would you like to be among the only people in the world to understand exactly how you were made?” He stares right into her eyes, as her hatred flexes and contracts. “How would you like to be among the only people in the world to see exactly what you can do?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to the patience of current readers, and to beloved betas/fam that helped make this a reality, as usual. Everyone in my writer discord, especially -- y'all are tops.


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